I find it funny they say Whatsapp "chose" Erlang. They "chose" Erlang because ejabberd was written on it, and they chose ejabberd because of a Jabber mailing list suggestion. That's about it...
are you saying that the choice was purely due to luck? Would whatsapp have been as popular and successful had it not been in erlang but some other language/stack?
> are you saying that the choice was purely due to luck?
What he is saying is, that they chose the best open source tool available for their use case at that time, and not a programming language.
> Would whatsapp have been as popular and successful had it not been in erlang but some other language/stack?
I would argue, that they might not have been as efficient in terms of computational resources and the number of technical employees needed, but they would still have succeeded even if the back-end was implemented in Java.
Because what all WhatsApp users actually interacted with were the clients – and they were not written in Erlang.
