Being embedded in the San Francisco Bay Area, I am bombarded by the hippest, coolest software development ideas and projects on all sides. One I've noticed lately is Erlang. I've been hearing a lot of chittering about it from sources, particularly my more fringe-ish friends. It would seem that Erlang is the place to be for concurency, which many equate with cheaper scaling, the holy grail of modern enterprise software development. I'm carving up some research on the topic, and I was surprised to see that, despite the rather vocal proponants of the language around me, there are only two ads on Craigslist, here, looking for the skill. One of those is new Valley darling Loopt, so I'd imagine they're running CouchDB.

So, Erlang's not likely to be the Ruby of 2009, but I'm not yet ready to say that it won't be they AJAX of 2011. Who knows, the Europeans sure seem to like the language. This would seem natural, and Erlang is of Norse decent. But the biggers consulting companies with Erlang experience or expertise are also located "on the continent," as the Brits say. 

Incidentally, that's Damien Katz, above, who won the Erlanger of the year award. He's the one on the right. Congrats Damien!