Did they succeed because of Erlang or in spite of Erlang? We can't draw any reliable conclusions from a single data point. Maybe a different platform would have worked even better?

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HalcyonicStorm a day ago | parent | next [-]

Erlang is uniquely suited to chat systems out of the box in a way that most other ecosystems aren't. Lightweight green threads via the BEAM vm, process scheduler so concurrent out of the box, immutable data structures, message passing as communication between processes.

	▲	nradov 12 hours ago \| parent [-]
		There's nothing unique about Erlang. I have nothing against it but other companies have built messaging systems using other platforms that work as well or better than WhatsApp.

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awesome_dude a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Yeah - the technology used is a seperate concern to their abilities as users (developers) of that technology and the effectiveness at handling the scale.

I, for example, have always said that I am more than capable of writing code in C that is several orders of magnitude SLOWER than what I could write in.. say Python.

My skillset would never be used as an example of the value of C for whatever