Online gambling firm Bet365 has swapped Java for Erlang

If you read the article he mention that his company needed low latency.

Java doesn't have a preemptive scheduler.

An example would be, an infinite loop.

If you have an infinite loop in a msg pass to an actor then that message will use the Actor forever in Scala. Because the scheduler is not preemptive.

For Erlang, it'll let that msg (infinte loop) run for a small amount of time, put it back in the queue/mailbox and run another task for some time and etc..

Also all actor in Erlang are new processes, so if a process fail it doesn't take down the main process. I've talked to an Akka company and apparently you can spawn actor for akka in same thread/process.

IIRC actor in Scala had a weird caveat in coding too. But it's been so long since I've used Scala.

The article mentioned small language in Erlang. Erlang gives you primitive to create distributed language. As in it's built into the language to spawn a process, to link the process together and monitor it, etc...

With Scala it's a library.

Also Erlang isn't just a programming language it's the run time, as you can see with premptive scheduler and etc.. Erlang is powerful because it BEAM or it's VM.

At the time, Elixir had not hit 1.0 and while there's a lot of overlap between elixir and erlang this is a good comparison because Elixir is a lot less common than erlang.

Here's the thing-- by having that filter of using this language-- a good language-- we self selected for good engineers because the good engineers were either already using it or were very interested in it. I for one, for instance, came to that job, relocating across the country just because I wanted to work in that language.

There is a learning curve, and you're going to want to seed your staff with expertise (it sounds like bet365 did this), but there's no reason that a competent developer can't learn this or any other functional language.

And given the increasing usage of Erlang, it's a good skill to pick up - so if you have the opportunity to learn it as part of a job you already have, so much the better.