[toast0]

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.