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by kyllo 3771 days ago
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.
1 comments

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.

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. :-)

Do you have references for the claim about telco switching?
http://erlang.se/publications/ericsson_review_axd301_1998012...

erlang was literally developed for telephone switches

That's a product from the late nineties. I have no idea how broadly it's used today.
A talk by Joe Armstrong I watched recently indicated that around 50% of 3G and more than that of 4G infrastructure uses Ericsson technology, specifically with swoftware written in Erlang. He made a joke about 'sweating over every bit' sent over the network and then complaining that all the apps are going crazy with their JSON.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ericsson#Products_and_services

Watch this video it explains clearly how it is used:

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

And it is also fun!

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