Completely ignoring the massive resources it would take to make the switch in the first place.
Erjang doesn't cut it. It's an incomplete research project that works on the basis of bytecode translation. Further, the disadvantages with regards to global GC are clearly listed. You say that it'll only keep improving, but that's essentially taking a leap of faith that the JVM developers will eventually get to parity with a feature you already have.
"Limited resources" is a red herring and FUD, plain and simple. Nor is "wider reach" guaranteed in the slightest. Wider reach is not intrinsically a good thing, either. Organizations for whom Erlang is out of reach simply because it doesn't use the JVM are absolutely petty and there is no loss from them not using it, IMO.
Erlang generally encourages shared-nothing architectures. Of course, in some cases you want regions of shared memory or some other concurrent global resource, hence ETS. I see nothing wrong with ETS, it's well optimized for the Erlang term format in particular and gives you serializable updates.
Scalability and large actor counts aren't the definitive features of Erlang, though. It's supervision trees, the distribution protocol, the OTP framework, the primacy of tuples and lists as your main and highly flexible data types, a great pattern matching engine for binary formats and regular Erlang terms alike, module-level hotswapping, a crash-only programming model, the ability to have external programs benefit from Erlang semantics via external nodes and ports, so on and so forth.
Yes, not all of this is thanks to the VM in of itself. A lot of it is runtime and language features.
But it's already there in a cohesive whole. There is absolutely no reason to switch to the JVM when the EVM is a beast of its own.
Technically the distribution protocol is a property of the runtime system, but it does cooperate with the VM for details like term serialization.
True, that is a selling point, except that so many Erlang systems have so much C in them (because Erlang isn't fast enough for the data plane), that they can still bring down the entire VM (not as if there aren't other ways of doing that even without native code).
This is only the case for NIFs and (linked-in) port drivers, i.e. the facilities that are dynamically linked into the runtime. Regular ports which rely on a byte-oriented interface and are controlled by an Erlang process are safe, as are external nodes (typically, but not necessarily C nodes) which use the erl_interface libraries for marshalling/unmarshalling into and from Erlang terms, and thus can be treated from the programmer's perspective like they're regular Erlang VM nodes.
Chapter 26 of Programming Erlang, 2nd Edition, Programming Multicore CPUs, quite explicitly notes the problem of avoiding sequential bottlenecks, and even devotes an entire exercise to parallelizing a sequential program.
Network effects. There's entire subcultures that have de facto clustered themselves onto GitHub, like the Erlang community. Most web developers, as well.
You're right the actual GitHub interface is not as amazing as it is often heralded. I've always thought the issue tracker was a joke, for instance.
No, that's oversimplified, I find. The quote implies that the colonizers found Africans to be more suited to fulfilling slave roles, and that the master-slave cycle formulated earlier is a genetic one. It doesn't make a direct judgment whether the colonizers were correct. The jab at political correctness doesn't seem to be an absolute refutation of opposing arguments, so much as an outlining of the historian's fallacy of trying to apply contemporary moral value judgments to past circumstances. FWIW, there was "political correctness" (sidestepping taboos) in those days, but the taboos were wildly different.
a) Describing a master-slave structure with the implication that it is a biologically programmed one.
b) That some are born for more dominant roles, some for more submissive ones, and then others who are in between or neither.
c) That the aforementioned characteristics are genetic.
Not particularly savory, but also a pretty standard evopsych position. In fact, I'd say that the only truly controversial part is the argument that these structures are innate and predetermined. That such master-slave structures permeate society is readily observable.
Additionally, their categorizations of "fast", "secure" and "cross-platform" are far too general.
I don't even think Rust officially supports that many platforms yet. It's strictly OS X/Windows/Linux, and the latter depends on glibc unless you're willing to throw away a ton of the standard library and third-party crates to start from scratch.
Among minimum wage labor, he also mentioned impending homelessness, lack of private transportation (which, at least in the USA, is a huge impediment) and a total of $23 in life savings, which is pretty bad, even for a lot of people in rough situations.
I don't know if he's "as good as dead", but he's in a hard place, certainly. More than you're giving him credit for.
The OS itself has never seen mainstream adoption, but it is renowned for being very well designed, as well as pioneering several OS security features like W^X, strlcat, strlcpy and countless other tweaks.
That and the foundation's most important projects are probably OpenSSH (absolutely essential, main focus here) and OpenNTPD, rather than the OS itself.
Don't associate the entire project and foundation with the actions of their figurehead.
Honestly, Theo can be an asshole, but often his temper is warranted when he's faced with idiocy, like when RMS was unapologetically trying to persuade the removal of all mentions of non-free packages in OpenBSD. (http://article.gmane.org/gmane.os.openbsd.misc/134850)
I know this is what RMS does, and actually I'm sympathetic with his views, but in that context it was bullshit. This is just one incident, who knows how much Theo has to deal with other people wasting his energy on non-issues, trivialities and misconceptions?
For what it's worth, he isn't any less of a dick than Linus. Yet Linus consistently earns hero praise and adulation, the criticism of his personality being secondary and written off as justified. So why isn't Theo's justified?