>>I have heard this comment millions of time from management people.
Really?
>>These so called pragmatic languages are good to build "applications" which are just a bunch of API calls bound together
Guess what?
All software is building on top of something. Every heard of system calls?
>>and most of the so called programmers are building "applications", they have no idea of how to build real "systems"
May be you being such a great programmer can show us how to build a "real system", without ever using a API of anything ever.
>> Try to build "systems" in your so called pragmatic language and you will find what I mean.
Something like 99.99% of the world does that. Erlang is not even in the list top 10 languages in the world today.