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Comment by square_usual | Hacker News Reader

There's no shortage of jobs looking for elixir developers, which is based on erlang.

As sort of an aside, that can be an interesting lens to view hiring through. A while back I was looking around, and since I have some history with Erlang, was looking for roles involving Erlang and Elixir, among other things. I've architected and written production Erlang code that's deployed in products and know the system fairly well. But I don't have a lot of Elixir experience.

Some companies were like "wow, that's a lot of BEAM experience - let's talk!".

Others were like "my checkbox says Elixir, sorry".

I'm old enough at this point to realize the latter were doing me a big favor.

I passed a couple Elixir interviews with zero knowledge of this language :) You can just treat it as Erlang with funny syntax.

There are a few more substantial differences, like Elixir utiling binaries rather than Erlang's 'strings' that I think are nice improvements, but I was never worried about getting up to speed with Elixir. The tricky bits of working with BEAM are nicely illustrated here:

https://ferd.ca/ten-years-of-erlang.html

Any sensible employer should treat Erlang and Elixir experience as equivalent. There are important differences, but it would only take 2 weeks for someone experienced with one to be pretty up to speed with the other.

It is, for instance, the opposite situation to C and C++. In that case, they are languages that share syntax but you should code in fundamentally different ways. Erlang and Elixir don't share syntax, but all the important core concepts are the same.

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