I must have missed the current common language "philosophies", at least what concerns their opposition to focus on stability ... what are these? Can I avoid them?
C is not a language optimized for stability. The possibility for segfaults, buffer overflows, etc. and the lack of a sensible mechanism for handling them other than "write the program correctly" demonstrate this. It is, essentially, a language optimized for writing Unix.
Shell is not a language optimized for stability. It is optimized for interactive use, above all else - it's not even a very good scripting language, even though it's historically been used that way an awful lot.
The primary focus of Java (at the time of it's creation) was "write once, run anywhere". The primary focus of Java (now) is "languages that compile to JVM bytecode are nifty - plus, we have C-like syntax but are a high-level language".
The primary focus of Erlang, before and above anything else, is program stability. OTP exists to increase stability. "Let it crash" exists to increase stability. Parallelism and message passing are in the language not because they're neat, but because (if they are used at all sensibly) they will increase stability.
Put that way your point is more clear. You compare with languages from the last 40 years, I took some issue with "current".
Still I cannot see why this is a cultural issue that keeps developers away. Missing things like good string-libs, or ",;." syntax hassles, ok. But stability-features?
The point you address for C is , in a way, also valid for Erlang. It's your program which has to be stable, the language just offer you supervisors and independent processes. "Write it correctly" is the only way to achieve that goal, Erlang does not help you with that. Could be that messing up an OTP behaviour is as easy as dereferencing a null pointer... (disclaimer: I'm no Erlang developer)
