[goralph]

In a commercial setting (i.e. not a side-project) the choice of programming language is also a business decision.

The main factors being:

- How large is the pool of available candidates for this language? A recruiting risk.

- How mature is this language? A business continuity risk.

[viccis]

>How large is the pool of available candidates for this language? A recruiting risk.

I worked at a company with a massive Erlang codebase. Really nasty, not really following good OTP practices, etc. HUGE hiring problem and it took 6-12 months to spin up new devs to the point that they could really have ownership over things. And this is not a system that even remotely needed this.

Elixir might seem better until you write enough of it to realize that you do basically have to learn Erlang or else you'll always be at a disadvantage when it comes to really understanding it.

[josevalim]

You don't have to learn the Erlang language (and this is commonly echoed by the community). At a certain scale, you have to learn the runtime, but this is the same for any technology. You have to learn JVM if you are doing Kotlin, there are plenty of discussions on V8 internals if you are running Node, etc.

[victorbjorklund]

You def dont need to learn Erlang to code in Elixir (other than maybe the very basics to interact with some Erlang libraries like ETS).

[mtndew4brkfst]

As José answered more gracefully, you don't need to learn the syntax but you do need to learn the semantics, the performance gotchas, and for most projects I'd say you'll probably need to consume Erlang documentation which is certainly a learned skill.