[incepted]

> Even though it is probably the most practically used functional language.

Would love to get some evidence to back up Erlang being the most practically used functionally used language, because for all I know, it's hardly used at all these days.

[seiji]

"practical" as in: the programing model fits the problem domain model of modern systems.

But, "practical" doesn't show up on everybody's radar much these days with so much effort focused around fads-of-the-half-decade.

Erlang is made by professionals with decades of experience who grow the system towards being the most stable, scalable, safe, and as understandable as possible. People use Erlang, solve problems, stay quiet, then make money using it.

On the other hand, the thought leader these days seems to be Go (even though it's made by out of touch weirdos (review: http://www.evanmiller.org/four-days-of-go.html)) and has a creepy cult/fanatical following more suited to tribal sportsball teams than what we would expect from professional technical work needing to be stable over the long term.

[tempodox]

A language like Go that has political campaigns encoded in its compiler has creepiness written all over it. For me, this is a no-go area, pun intended.

[incepted]

> Erlang is made by professionals with decades of experience

Who are they, besides Joe? Can you at least provide their names?

I'd really like to take a look at their credentials because beyond WhatsApp and an obscure Ericsson router from 20 years ago, there isn't much data to go by.

And there is plenty of evidence to show that C, C++, Java and more recently Go have some pretty strong success stories to justify their claim to scalability.

[SanFranManDan]

Riot Games is a pretty big one. Looking at erlangs site selecting a few:

AdRoll Facebook Chat TMobile

http://erlang.org/faq/introduction.html

Amazon SimpleDB Delicious From: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1636455/where-is-erlang-u...

Also many of the companies using Riak (written in Erlang) also leverage erlang. Some pretty big names use it.

http://basho.com/about/customers/

I would say that Erlang has more than proved itself.

One aspect of it is that it is used more of an infrastructure language so not many people see it as glamorous as rushing out to the Go community to brag about their new backend. Its a lot of mature companies that have been around a while and don't really need to show off their infrastructure.

Also Elixir is gaining momentum (but still a blip) as a very viable language built on erlang.

Use what you want and what works.

[incepted]

> One aspect of it is that it is used more of an infrastructure language

Ah yes, the "dark matter" argument. It's out there but nobody can see it. You'll just have to trust me.

[thinkpad20]

You posted asking for evidence of erlang being a practical, widely-used programming language. The posts in response have provided a huge number of examples of erlang not just "in production" but critically so. And yet, you seem to be resignedly unimpressed; all of your follow-up posts seem to be in the form of shrugs and harrumphs. What more are you asking for?

[incepted]

I was asking for the names of the experts allegedly behind Erlang.

As for listing companies that use Erlang, plenty of companies use PHP and COBOL too. This doesn't say anything about whether these languages are the most adequate for the task and whether these projects wouldn't be in a better shape if written in a different language.

[querulous]

robert virding, richard o'keefe, francisco cesarini, mike williams, joe armstrong, ulf wiger, brian troutwine, fred hebert, jose vadim, steve vinoski, serge aleynikov?

[troutwine]

Aww shucks. Bless your heart.

[exclusiv]

Not disputing your claim, but CouchDB is quite an impressive effort built on Erlang.

[muhmi]

And Riak

[arthurcolle]

and Elixir

[mavelikara]

> Who are they, besides Joe? Can you at least provide their names?

One of them is here on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=rvirding

[kyllo]

Practicality is subjective, though. Unless you conduct an opinion poll, you will not find data objectively demonstrating that one language is more "practical" than another.

[incepted]

Sure, but I interpreted OP's statement as saying "used in practice" as in "used in the real world".

Pretty sure that Erlang would barely register as a blip on such a chart.

[im_down_w_otp]

Almost all the successful non-Google ad networks and exchanges are written in Erlang, Goldman Sachs HFT platform is written in Erlang, several massive scale game platform backends are written in Erlang, several international "national net" banking switches are written in Erlang, a huge chunk of the global land-line and mobile telco switching infrastructure is written in Erlang, Heroku's control plane is written in Erlang, GitHub's RPC backplane is written in Erlang, Amazon SimpleDB is written in Erlang, Bet365's high-scale betting platform is written in Erlang, Pinterest is migrating services to Elixir (rooted in Erlang).

There's a ton of stuff written in Erlang out there. A lot of really core infrastructure services that have to just run and run and run.

It's not particularly trendy, but it gets shit done, and it does so with a quiet dignity. :-)

[mbrock]

Do you have references for the claim about telco switching?

[querulous]

http://erlang.se/publications/ericsson_review_axd301_1998012...

erlang was literally developed for telephone switches

[mbrock]

That's a product from the late nineties. I have no idea how broadly it's used today.

[rdtsc]

Watch this video it explains clearly how it is used:

https://youtu.be/rQIE22e0cW8?t=662

And it is also fun!

[biokoda]

That was the reason Erlang was created in the first place: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erlang_%28programming_language...

[mbrock]

I know that. The last I heard was that Erlang decided to stop developing with Erlang, causing Armstrong and others to leave. I see they've reverses that decision and there are mentions of use at various mobile companies, so that's cool.

[abiox]

RabbitMQ and CouchDB are written Erlang; Much of Ericsson's telephony infrastructure runs it; various companies in their industry like TMobile and Motorola use it.