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I guess if you wanted to be snippy, you could say that Erlang isn't good at doing something it wasn't specifically designed for, which isn't a great feature for a language.

I actually like Erlang, and have used it professionally, but have a feeling that it's just not going to be a language that's used too much outside of its sweet spot.

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you could say that Erlang isn't good at doing something it wasn't specifically designed for, which isn't a great feature for a language

To be fair, slowness of startup time would be a criticism of the stock Erlang runtime, rather than of the language itself. As projects like Squeak, Rubinius, and the official Java VM have shown, this sort of speed issue can improve independently of the language semantics.

In the real world though, the current Erlang runtime is all we've got, so it's fair to talk about Erlang's startup time being slow.

The runtime has a lot of really good features, too - it's solid, pretty fast, and is very well tested.

Erlang was designed for building scalable, highly available distributed systems. If it's not good at building other things, e.g. first person shooters, that's not a meaningful disadvantage.

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