
Ask HN: Should I learn Erlang? - alistproducer2
There&#x27;s a cryptocurrency project I&#x27;m considering contributing to that&#x27;s written in Erlang. I&#x27;m curious about Erlang&#x27;s usefulness in other contexts. Is it a language that can open doors for you (job-wise)?
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dvliman
There are plenty of companies using erlang in production. The community is
relatively small and almost everyone knows each other. Yes, you can find
erlang jobs or elixir jobs - a lot of those these days (PM me if you are
looking)

Besides, erlang definitely gives you new perspective in building large scale
system; supervision tree (let it crash), the actor concept, message passing,
preemptive vm, built-in distributed erlang nodes, the repl, hot code swapping
- any much more

The power comes from the whole ecosystem. Concurrency is built from ground up
on language & vm level.

~~~
bello
> Besides, erlang definitely gives you new perspective in building large scale
> system; supervision tree (let it crash), the actor concept, message passing,
> preemptive vm, built-in distributed erlang nodes, the repl, hot code
> swapping - any much more

Can't emphasize this enough. Programming in Erlang will enable you to build
novel mental models, useful beyond Erlang/Elixir.

Moreover, Erlang is a small language, and once you get past the unusual
syntax, pretty easy to learn.

I work on a large scale production system in Erlang on a day to day basis;
feel free to email me if I can be helpful in any way.

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tombert
Erlang itself is pretty hard to find work in, though not impossible.

That said, it's an interesting platform that is a lot of fun, and its concepts
can be applied to a lot of different platforms. Its inherent "treat everything
as a self-contained service" turns out to be a fairly useful way to structure
applications.

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bandris
There are not many Erlangs jobs, but as only the more determined developers
bother to learn it, you can expect better qualified co-workers in an Erlang
shop compared to an average/popular language shop. (Generally true with other
niche languages too.) So, once you find an Erlang job chances are good that
you will like it. Also it as a language to beat the averages TODAY.
[http://paulgraham.com/avg.html](http://paulgraham.com/avg.html)

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chris_va
Honestly, once you learn 5 or 6 languages, picking up a new one (not as a deep
expert, but enough to functionally contribute to an open source project) takes
only a day or so.

If you are not there yet, take every opportunity to learn a new language,
doesn't really matter which as long as you have a good breadth (e.g. don't do
entirely functional languages).

~~~
dllthomas
> Honestly, once you learn 5 or 6 languages, picking up a new one (not as a
> deep expert, but enough to functionally contribute to an open source
> project) takes only a day or so.

I think this really depends on some of those 5 or 6 languages being similar to
the new one. If I know C, C++, Python, Java, Perl and C#, I'm not going to
walk right into Prolog or SML or Scheme. (Your second paragraph is related to
this, I just wanted to call it out a little clearer.)

