[lysace]

My impression from Ericssonland:

Around year 2008 being an Erlang coder was often more or less seen as being a COBOL coder in Sweden. Bluetail had sort of failed, having burned lots of VC, iirc.

So Erlang was something weird and custom that Ericsson used to build software for legacy phone exchanges. I remember that a colleague's wife working at Ericsson had received on-the-job training from essentially zero programming knowledge to become an Erlang developer in order to maintain some phone exchange software.

It's been fascinating to see it morph into something cool. Whatsapp, etc.

[cmrdporcupine]

FWIW among PL nerds Erlang was "cool" in 2000 to 2007, too. It was constantly talked about on Lambda The Ultimate, I would have loved to have used it at my work at the time... I saw it used at multiple startups in the 2008-2010 period, and it eventually got deployed for the backend of Facebook's initial Messenger version, among other places.

If anything, it fell out of favour and lost hype wave for some time after that, while other languages copied aspects of the Actor model... and mostly the BEAM hype came back in the form of Elixir.