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Comment by woodcut | Hacker News Reader

Finding an erlang programmer available on site within 1-2 months is the hardest part of deciding to go with erlang. With go you can take a C++/python programmer and have them writing production code pretty soon, i think this is what inhibits functional programming in general, the learning curve bundled with the amount of work around prevents people jumping onboard also willingness of some employers to hire someone without a ton of exp. with erlang makes it difficult for a senior programmer to switch.

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Truthfully, I think the supply of programmers with functional programming skills far outstrips the demand. I use FP languages on personal projects (most recently Clojure) all the time, but the day job is still programming in Java at a shop that is all Java, all the time.

Every time I suggest bringing a language like Scala or Clojure into the mix (where they would provide real benefits over Java), I always get the "And where will we find programmers to maintain the code you write?" line from management. The answer, of course, is that there are likely legions of programmers like me, who hack around with FP languages in their spare time but whose only 'professional' experience is in mainstream languages.

I suspect the real reason is that most management is just too risk-averse to consider using technology that isn't mainstream.

Why don't you tell them that?

That's changing now, thankfully. Most people at the company I work for use Clojure every day.

Two Erlang shops I know of never had problems finding Erlang devs. Competent devs will pick it up if they are interested in it even if they haven't done it full time before.

I did that to some extent.

> i think this is what inhibits functional programming in general

Yes, functional aspect was the harder part to learn. It wasn't the syntax, which is what most people mention.

The other part that is hard is to learn to use concurrency construct -- actors. But Go has the same problem, solving problems with goroutines and channels is just as much of impedance mismatched as using actors.

Actually, the hardest part of deciding to go with Erlang is not finding a programmer within 1-2 months, but deciding that one will need to train the programmer themselves (which obviously takes time; it took me half a year dabbling with Erlang and OTP (totally on my own) to actually start writing idiomatic code).

The trickiest bit about Erlang is not really FP - you can figure that out decently well in short order - it's OTP and processes and how all of that fits together, and how to do a good job with architecting everything.

Finding people should not be too hard. We were able to find a guy in Padova, Italy, who dove in and got started without much trouble as I was leaving.

>> With go you can take a C++/python programmer and have them writing production code pretty soon

In my experience, learning Go (and by that I mean fully grasping the ways of Go, goroutines, channels, selects, interfaces, type switches, etc) takes at least a year for someone whose background is C/Python/Ruby. Then may be it's just me.

It took me a good 3 months of fighting with the language before it started to click for me, and then another 3 months to really start using it properly. It sucks to always read things like "I was able to write production code on the first day!" around here.

I think that depends on the mindset of how you see computer languages. I like learning new languages, every time I encounter some new language, I have to try it out and get at least something basic working.

I'm pretty decent at C, C++, Python and Bash scripting, have participated in larger projects in Java, Perl, Pascal/Delphi and Ruby, and have toyed around with Rust, Haskell, Clojure, Angelscript, Crystal, Lua and probably a bunch more that I forget.

Go for me was a breeze, everything just clicked. It helps that it got a lot of it's inspiration from other languages I already knew pretty well. When started toying around with Haskell for example, this wasn't the case, it took me quite a while to get me up & running with the basics, and I still don't think I know basic Haskell. Go on the other hand was easy, and within a week I was diving into the stdlib sourcecode.

I think for everyone this number is different. Depends on your background, years of experience, knowledge about computer science (not how to write in specific language) etc.

I am polyglot (i write in different langauges) and it took me couple of weeks to master Go.

Read "The Go programming language" book, it's really well written and it touches everything you need to know about Go (or most).

It totally took a year to really internalize goisms. But a week or so to pickup the basics, and some really deep code reviews and a bit of pair programming from people I respect, including the author of this article, helped me quickly learn most of the low hanging goisms and the a large portion of the standard library.

The time to go from python dev but never touched go to working on a go code base is measured in weeks in my experience.

I've been programming Go for almost 2 years and I routinely get stuck trying to figure out the "right" way to do something in the language.

For reference, I felt comfortable in Java, Scala, C# and Perl all faster than Go.

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