But somehow the Haskell, OCaml and Scala users never want to include Erlang when talking about "functional". Even though it is probably the most practically used functional language.
Would love to get some evidence to back up Erlang being the most practically used functionally used language, because for all I know, it's hardly used at all these days.
But, "practical" doesn't show up on everybody's radar much these days with so much effort focused around fads-of-the-half-decade.
Erlang is made by professionals with decades of experience who grow the system towards being the most stable, scalable, safe, and as understandable as possible. People use Erlang, solve problems, stay quiet, then make money using it.
On the other hand, the thought leader these days seems to be Go (even though it's made by out of touch weirdos (review: http://www.evanmiller.org/four-days-of-go.html)) and has a creepy cult/fanatical following more suited to tribal sportsball teams than what we would expect from professional technical work needing to be stable over the long term.
But the feature set of Facebook is not all implemented in Haskell or OCaml either. There is lots of PHP etc.
This is not true. Having written a good amount of OCaml I would argue that programming with side-effects in OCaml is extremely approachable - almost as much as Clojure. There are mutable data structures in the stdlib (Array, Hashtbl) and IO etc. is straightforward. Like Clojure, there exists a ref type which can be easily mutated. It's one of the reasons why OCaml strikes as an extremely pragmatic language to me.
Or functional as having proper closures.
Or tail call elimination.
Or using immutable data, or immutable variables.
Or minimizing mutable state.
Or being decalrative.
etc...
;-)
https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2015/07/01/language-rankings-6-1...
That seems like a very dangerous thing to do to me.
Has no relevance to actual language quality, potential or value.
If this wasn't the case, then no language would ever pass, or fall behind, another language in popularity.
Popularity is a reflection of already-realized value. That's all.
