[bcrosby95]

> Erlang couldn't work with Conway's Law without totally converting your entire company to it, which just isn't going to happen.

I think this says more than you think it does.

I've worked in software development professionally for 20 years. I have never worked at a company that had more than 1 backend language. A large percentage of developers work at small companies.

Erlang/Elixir/BEAM isn't for the Googles of the world. And that's fine. Tech needs to stop its infatuation with these companies. Just because something is right for those companies, doesn't mean it's right for yours. Ignoring this has done a lot of damage over the years. Production complexity is a killer.

People love to talk about scaling (and here, I'm talking about scaling a company), but only ever mention one aspect: scaling up. Things also have to scale down. Technological choices tend to sacrifice one for the other.

But BEAM languages have a wider scaling band than most other technological choices. And that is in large part because of everything it offers out of the box.

[weatherlight]

No one ever talks about scaling down systems, everything is always additive.