You're approaching this wrong; they do take the little and big people seriously. It's also a 20(?) year old language with a lot of features! You can't possibly add/remove everything everyone wants - I think the team behind Erlang is doing an exceptional job of maintaining stability while getting new features and cleaned up releases out.
Also - my own startup uses Erlang extensively (we use Riak, yes, but our actual application is built on top of Erlang too); I would say 80% of our codebase consists of Erlang. It's rock solid and the concurrency and distribution features (and ease of use) are unmatched. Also - OTP, nothing compares to OTP yet (Akka is trying to get there, but they have a long journey ahead of them).
I've been trying to learn a little erlang for a while. One of the things that holds me back is the external libraries. If it's a part of erlang/OTP, then great, usually I'm happy with it.
But it's hard to find, install, and update external libraries compared with many other languages (like haskell/cabal, ruby/gems, etc.). How do you deal with that on a practical level?
There isn't a central clearing house at the moment. But the conventions is to use a tool called "rebar" and you simply add a dependency in your rebar.conf like
and then it will use cowboy's rebar.conf to download what it requires, in this case ranch. So, you can just link to the top level library you care about it most cases and let rebar deal with it.
After asking around on IRC, I found out about CEAN, which looks like it's trying to be a central clearing house. But it's a little strange looking compared to ones that I'm used to... it doesn't look very community-oriented. I couldn't even find a license file for CEAN itself.
But it looks like rebar offers a lot already, so I'll look into that more.
Oh wow. I didn't know you were doing Erlang these days. (You know me as StoneCypher.)
Welcome to the flock. You're a very good programmer, assuming you're the person that I knew from efnet #c++, and the community will be improved for having you around.
Also - my own startup uses Erlang extensively (we use Riak, yes, but our actual application is built on top of Erlang too); I would say 80% of our codebase consists of Erlang. It's rock solid and the concurrency and distribution features (and ease of use) are unmatched. Also - OTP, nothing compares to OTP yet (Akka is trying to get there, but they have a long journey ahead of them).