I've written about Erlang in the past, and my suspicion that, soon or later, other languages/systems will come along and "eat its lunch". Scala is one such potential contender. Another that has been gaining some visiblity lately is node.js, a simple framework for creating networked applications on top of Google's V8 Javascript engine.

I should define what Erlang's lunch is a little bit better before we go on. Erlang does several things really, really well; better than many existing, mainstream systems:

Concurrency – the Actor model that it uses is much easier and more pleasant than dealing with threads. Distributed systems – Erlang makes this fairly easy and pleasant as well. Fault tolerant systems – using its distributed powers, Erlang is good for writing things like telephone switches that can't spend any significant time down.

Of these, I think the big one is concurrency. Distributed systems are nice, but not a critical point for most people. Same goes with fault-tollerant: those who need it really need it, but the rest of us are willing to make some compromises. Our web applications are important, but generally not something where people's lives hang in the balance.

How does Erlang do "concurrency"? The developer creates Erlang "processes" that interact with one another by passing messages. These are not real, OS level processes, though, and this is critical to how Erlang operates. Since these processes must all coexist within one real, system level process, it is absolutely essential that no operation that they perform hangs the entire system! The Erlang runtime system is built around this concept. Any Erlang process can do things like read and write to the disk or network, or have a "while (true) { …. }" loop (it doesn't actually look quite like that in Erlang, but that's the idea), and it won't wedge the system. This knowledge is also critical when you want to interface Erlang to the outside world: if your C library contains a routine that might block for a long time, you can't just call it from Erlang as it won't be a well-behaved part of Erlang's world (there are ways around this of course, but make life a bit more complicated for the developer). All this is done with Erlang's scheduler: each Erlang process gets a number of operations it can run before some other process gets to run, so even our while loop will only run for a bit before the system moves on to something else. IO is rigorously done with non-blocking calls internally in order to keep that from becoming an issue.

No other system that I know of has such a focus on being non-blocking, and node.js is no exception: a while(true) loop is perfectly capable of wedging the system. Node.js works by passing functions (closures, in many cases) around so that work can be performed as needs be. However, the actual functions that run actually do block the system, and thus must be written in order to not run for too long. Also, and this is important, Node.js also does its best to make IO non-blocking by default, so that you don't have to worry about IO calls.

Node.js isn't up to the level Erlang is at, because it requires more manual intervention and thinking about how to do things, but it's probably "good enough" for many tasks. How often do you really write code with so many calculations that it slows things down? Not often in my case – the real world problem I most often encounter is IO, and node.js does its best to make that non-blocking, so that it can be handled in the "background" or a bit at a time, without wedging the system. And if you really needed to write a long-running calculation (say you want to stream the digits of PI or something), you can break up your calculation manually, which may not be quite as elegant as Erlang, but is "good enough" for many people.

"Good enough" concurrency, combined with a language that is at least an order of magnitude more popular than Erlang, and a fast runtime, combined with ease of use in general (it's way easier to get started with node.js than with most Erlang web stuff) make for a system that's likely to do fairly well in terms of diffusion and popularity, and is going to "eat some of Erlang's lunch". Or perhaps, rather than actually taking users away from Erlang, it's likely to attract people that might have otherwise gone to Erlang.