I don't buy this argument. Erlang does have a steep learning curve, but it isn't the semantics of the language, it's understanding how to build and deploy OTP applications. Understanding apps, releases, clustering, mnesia, process registries, circuit breaking etc. all take time. It also will cost you hours, and hours, and hours down the road when you have a large sprawling app with very little abstraction and no -specs, because dialyzer is frustrating.
I was able to learn Rust in about week by reading the O'reilly book. Compared to C++ it's almost tiny (I have many Bjarn's C++ tome and the Meyers books right next to my Rust books actually), and unlike C++, the compiler will essentially teach you the language if you didn't learn enough from the book to write code that compiles.
Once you've put in the initial investment, Rust code is way easier to maintain, read, and scale. It's also easier to onboard people. Onboarding people for Erlang is hard, and it's hard to hire for. Rust on the other hand is familiar to all of our FP people who like Haskell and Erlang, and our Java and C++ devs.
I've also found it extremely suitable for writing services. We have many services in Rust running in production right now. We have a service toolkit for our cross cutting concerns. We can run our IDL through a compiler and get a client and server that are on the order of 20x faster than their Erlang counterparts.
I was able to learn Rust in about week by reading the O'reilly book. Compared to C++ it's almost tiny (I have many Bjarn's C++ tome and the Meyers books right next to my Rust books actually), and unlike C++, the compiler will essentially teach you the language if you didn't learn enough from the book to write code that compiles.
Once you've put in the initial investment, Rust code is way easier to maintain, read, and scale. It's also easier to onboard people. Onboarding people for Erlang is hard, and it's hard to hire for. Rust on the other hand is familiar to all of our FP people who like Haskell and Erlang, and our Java and C++ devs.
I've also found it extremely suitable for writing services. We have many services in Rust running in production right now. We have a service toolkit for our cross cutting concerns. We can run our IDL through a compiler and get a client and server that are on the order of 20x faster than their Erlang counterparts.