Anecdote: I used Erlang, over the course of several years, for very-high-level bot behavior and multi-player mission control, where performance was much less important than the things Erlang provides, but I still had issues with it. Nonetheless, I felt it had given me great leverage, and I thanked Joe Armstrong profusely, when I met him at a conference. Later at the con, I asked a panel whether there were active efforts at improving performance, perhaps with a JIT. They seemed to take it as an attack, and suggested that if I need performance, I should use another language. I mostly write in Clojure now.
Anecdote: I used Erlang, over the course of several years, for very-high-level bot behavior and multi-player mission control, where performance was much less important than the things Erlang provides, but I still had issues with it. Nonetheless, I felt it had given me great leverage, and I thanked Joe Armstrong profusely, when I met him at a conference. Later at the con, I asked a panel whether there were active efforts at improving performance, perhaps with a JIT. They seemed to take it as an attack, and suggested that if I need performance, I should use another language. I mostly write in Clojure now.