Hacker News Reader

Comment by wbl | Hacker News Reader

Even the ones writing telephone switches?

Relation of Erlang to telco switching is somewhat opposite than what most people believe. Ericsson's stored program switches do not run on Erlang, but use execution model enforced by hardware that undeniably was inspiration for Erlang.

Other manufacturers used either some traditional mix of C(++) and assembly or got on the CCITT/ITU bandwagon of CHILL ("CCITT High Level Language"), which is combination of C/BLISS style low level execution model with Algol/Pascal syntax and COBOL-like verbosity with some extent of native support for threading and coroutines.

There are very few companies developing telephone switches. Ericsson famously ditched Erlang in the late 90s, and as I hear there's very little Erlang remaining there.

Can't say about other companies.

Cisco uses Erlang in the control plane apparently [1]

[1] https://twitter.com/guieevc/status/1002494428748140544

Ericsson absolutely still uses Erlang [1] - the vast majority, if not all, of the core Erlang/OTP team are employed by Ericsson, and that team is still very much active and constantly improving the language and runtime.

[1] https://www.ericsson.com/en/news/2018/5/erlang-celebrates-20...

Yes, I know that. They have the team and continue developing and improving Erlang because they have paying customers who use Erlang.

Inside the rest of Ericsson, however, there's very little Erlang left. Once again, only hearsay, no hard proof. They still hire for Erlang here and there (used to be primarily non-Swedish offices) [1], and they offer theses for Erlang [2]

[1] https://jobs.ericsson.com/jobs?keywords=erlang&page=1

[2] https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/master-thesis-erlang-json...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com