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This is the problem I have with Erlang developers. They only want to work on Erlang. Pragmatism be damned. It is never about the product or the company. It is only about which of the remaining 20 Erlang expert personalities in the world do they get to work alongside with. If there needs to be a special library, all other existing ones are garbage unless written by one of the 20 above, so they will just write their own. I hate to stereotype here, but I would never ever (again) bet my company on Erlang. It is insanely difficult to recruit for. They are truly some of the best developers in the world, but lack pragmatism for problems and every one problem can only be solved with functional programming using Erlang. In my experience, Erlang developers are Zealots for the language and nothing else. If your company decides to pivot away from Erlang to another more accessible language, say Go, you are likely to lose them all.

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"Yes, we are going to make your job six times less efficient and substantially more difficult, while simultaneously removing your main incentive for working here. No, you will not receive a raise or any other form of olive branch from us, management, in exchange for the fact that we have measurably reduced your quality of life. No, we are not negotiating this."

If any job I ever had did this, technical or otherwise, I'd leave too. Especially if you were going to rub salt in the wound and pick Go. It's akin to making someone mine coal with a rock instead of a machine.

I think this comment actually unintentionally is reinforcing his point.

Other programming languages than Erlang exist for a reason, they're not just fun toy languages for low IQ folks. There are tons of reasons why Erlang may not be a good fit for some project, and one of these other lesser languages would be a better fit, and he doesn't want to work with people who wouldn't even consider something like that.

Two possibilities here:

1. either the person who asked this question doesn't understand that most of the utility in this ecosystem comes from the BEAM VM, the OTP, and the community around them, not just from the Erlang-the-programming-language.

2. or he/she employs the sunk cost fallacy here: I already invested time into learning Erlang and its Prolog-inspired syntax, so "screw Elixir". Disclaimer: I mistakenly avoided learning Elixir for this reason, simply because I already had lots of Erlang/OTP code already written over the years.

Yeah it's the point 2 , I guess but I really tried to get into Elixir but I really don't like its syntax

> There are tons of reasons why Erlang may not be a good fit for some project, and one of these other lesser languages would be a better fit

But that's not what they said. The statement was literally "to pivot away from erlang". Imagine you are working with, say, python (which I don't really like but it's a popular example) and were forced to switch to Visual Basic.

I don't even like Erlang. I'm just pointing out that removing the main incentive for being there for an employee without giving them something in return is naturally going to cause them to bail. You don't spit in a person's face and expect them to be happy about it.

I'd count myself as an Erlang developer. But where I worked, we didn't hire many people who had used Erlang before; and I didn't either. It's a small language, and it doesn't take too long for someone who's done a couple languages before to be productive and/or dangerous in it. Yes, immutable is a change; yes, recursion instead of loops is a mindfuck; Yes, a smart person can figure it out and deal. Personally, I loved the promise of Elixir --- BEAM with syntax that's better than Erlang, but I was hoping for different syntax, so I'm out; but it's fine, it seems to be a gravity well drawing people into BEAM, which is a good thing, IMHO.

I'm not going to reach for libraries in Erlang, because mostly I've seen them not be there, and a lot of stuff is almost the same amount of code and fuss to use a library as to build the portion of the library that's actually needed in the moment. Any code that you bring in is code that you're running and responsible for, so it's got to be worth it. I've pulled in libraries that needed a lot of rewriting, and sometimes that's better than starting from scratch, and sometimes it's not. There's a fair amount of stuff out there where someone scratched their itch and left it as is; which is fine and thank you, but it might need a lot of help to be run in a production capacity.

I'm working a new job now and there's probably no Erlang in it. Which is sad, but I'll deal. That said, if I was working in Erlang and management said we had to switch, I would be out. It's one thing to work without the benefits of Erlang, it's another to be working with them and then have it taken away.

Or let's say you take a job writing Go and they switch to Erlang? I'm curious how you would react?

If it makes you feel better, a lot of COBOL programmers actually wish it was extinct, because some of the systems they're maintaining are multiple decades old by now.

I suspect that if it wasn't for the virtualization drive behind 5G, Erlang would follow suit as a highly paid legacy language.

As it is, since many legacy telco systems are actually being replaced entirely by virtualized solutions, I see older companies still developing in it, but all hedging their bets on other things (I already mentioned C++ in another thread, but Go and Rust, backed by suitable frameworks that employ Raft and other sync/HA protocols, seem to be in the forefront).

> If your company decides to pivot away from Erlang to another more accessible language, say Go, you are likely to lose them all.

I was sympathizing until that final sentence. I'm not an Erlang programmer, but from what I know about both Erlang and Go, that seems like a terrible jump to make. Of course it depends on other circumstances in this hypothetical as well, but I probably would at least take this as an opportunity to reevaluate my current working situation as well.

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