It's also hard to market a system which introduces the New Shiny very slowly. How long did it take to get maps in, for instance?
I mean, I totally understand, and to a large extent approve of, their conservatism, but "this ecosystem is boring in a good way" is a hard sell to a generation brought up on 15 minute blog videos.
IO List and Binaries (look at Elixir, also Cowboy and pretty much every optimized piece of Erlang code) solved this problem quite some time ago. Yeah, more syntactic sugar would be nice, but then - unlike many other languages - you can just write a parse transform and be done with it.
Also "just write a parse transform" is not really encouraged very much because it'll make your code hard to read and maintain, something which is valued in Erlang land more than some super-tricky piece of really clever coding.
I mean, I totally understand, and to a large extent approve of, their conservatism, but "this ecosystem is boring in a good way" is a hard sell to a generation brought up on 15 minute blog videos.