Like most things, it depends what your web application is doing. I've been working in Erlang professionally nearly 6 years, and I'm not super convinced it's great for building web apps. If you want to utilize the Erlang VM, many people have found Elixir/Phoenix to be super helpful in building their web apps. I encourage you to check that out if it piques your interest.
busterarm|4 years ago
It boils down to the complexity that it saves you from. Webapps eventually grow to need caches and queues. That means external infrastructure dependencies on things like RabbitMQ, Kafka, Redis, Elasticsearch, etc. That also means managing the lifecycle of this infrastructure in your application and building robust systems to do maintenance, etc and not fail.
Erlang provides enough of the basic building blocks to trivially implement these features on BEAM in code, as I'm sure you already know. Then all you're doing is message passing with Erlang.
That's the secret sauce. The language features itself don't make it any better at solving the webapp problem than say Rails, etc...it's all of the ancillary problems of scaling webapps that are solved by everything just being code running on BEAM.
scns|4 years ago
[0] https://elixirschool.com/en/lessons/advanced/gen-stage/#