Comment by jabl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jabl | Hacker News Reader

My father worked at Ericsson for a long time back then, and while he wasn't involved in any of the AXE-N or Erlang stuff, he did hear water-cooler talk about the ongoing political battles. So this is like 3 layers removed from the people who were actually involved in it all, but anyway:

There was a huge push to move on from the in-house PLEX to industry standard software engineering. Object orientation, component architecture, UML, design patterns, etc.; think of a software engineering kool-aid from that time period, they were drinking it. And C++ was the industrial strength vehicle to deliver all of this.

AXE-N wasn't just a project that flopped, it was the crown jewel of this giant effort to switch to the new "industry standard" way to write telephony software. So the failure was a giant cultural shock.

But even after the AXE-N failure, the phalanx behind it weren't done for, and apparently it was they who managed to push through a ban on Erlang, that embarrassing thorn in their side.

As for what happened later, I don't know. Anybody who knows what language Ericsson is currently using to program their exchanges?

Ericsson is currently using Erlang where appropriate.

Open sourcing Erlang and it finding some success outside, meant it's no longer an in-house only language.

I think all modern Ericsson mobile network base stations use Erlang (at least for the configuration part) so most likely just using your phone you come in contact with an Erlang system everyday (depending on what gear your ISP use, but Ericsson is one of the largest providers of telecom equipment).

Lots of C++, but also Erlang and other languages depending on the product (and depending on which part of the product).

There were and are good reasons not to use Erlang. It's much (like an order of magnitude) harder to find developers who know it and almost impossible to find developers who can use it well (e.g know what a gen_server is). Much Erlang code I saw at Ericsson were technically written in Erlang but very much resembled imperative style code you'd find in a Java project. Erlang is also not very good at interacting with the surrounding system which is pretty important for a SoC.

I left Ericsson many years ago, but I bet that they are still using ClearCase for version control, FrameMaker for documentation, and that there are still five managers for every developer. Pretty sure they are still drinking the kool-aid, trying to put AI in their exchanges glued together with TypeScript.

Ericsson is a large company with many different products but I didn’t see any usage of ClearCase when I was there. It was mostly git, C++, etc. Some product was written in Erlang but most weren’t (what I know of at least)

Funny there was just a story on HN about the Rise and Fall of CORBA which was in Telecom vendor slide decks at the time.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36546954

TBH, I'm not sure CORBA is as bad as its reputation tells. It's a hard problem space overall, and seems nowadays we're reinventing (parts of) CORBA with things like gRPC etc.

It was a hard problem that could have had a much simpler solution than CORBA. There is no need for a Grand Unified Thingy that is so complicated nobody actually understands it.

Even back then you probably could use something as simple as xmlrpc and get the job done at 1/100 of cost of an CORBA solution.

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