I still recall a CS jobs fair at my college ~8 years ago, where some company representative took a very bad liking to Erlang on my CV (I took a "Programming Languages" course where Erlang was one of ~6 languages we chewed through. s/o venkat!)
He kept asking "why use this over Java at my work X". He seemed to have the idea I wanted to join his company and rewrite their web administrative tools used by 5 people in Erlang. Not sure why he got so annoyed, and didn't ask me about anything other than a language he thought was silly!
In one CS job application in college I wrote in the list of skills "can write good prose". By this I meant both that I knew English, which was not obvious at that time and place, and that I can structure text logically, e.g. for documentation.
The interviewer kept mocking it and asking what did I mean by prose and whether I can also write in rhymes if needed, and ended up not making an offer. Twenty years later, good writing is still the most important skill in my career and the one that I rely on most often.
About 10 years ago a friend of mine asked me to apply for a job in his team (at this big famous company starting with A). I had exactly the right qualifications and we had worked before so it was basically a done deal. I send my application through the normal channels and their HR team rejected me before reaching my friend.
Among my qualifications I had jokingly added that I could fake a Pink Floyd riff or two on the guitar...
Seems to be a general knee-jerk reaction from typical CS-majors and other Java/C++ "bros" around Erlang. A more mature reflection could easily see lots of potential niches for Erlang, with the big caveat from a business perspective of the relative difficulty in finding devs. I had the pleasure to encounter Erlang professionally many many moons agos, in it's originally intended role within telecoms switching, and was nothing but impressed by it.
The argument here might be less about Erlang and more about Maslow's hammer - i.e., if all you've got is a hammer then all you can see are nails.
"CS majors"? Can you specify which universities you think have that mindset?
At least for us, CS is just algorithms and maths, we had only one single course for a specific language in my five years (C) but you where required to just pick up whatever the professor chose.
If you check the list of computer science awards they all focus on algos & maths so it feels weird if you could get a degree with a "language is what matters" mindset.
Seems like the standard CS degree course in the UK (at least last time I researched this stuff which was some years ago) heavily focuses around teaching the most popular tech stacks and employability and does not really focus as much at fostering a general interest in CS.
I mean yes, but at least a few years ago when I last looked at this, CS degrees in this country were heavily SE oriented and standalone SE courses were rare. I think the problem was lots of people were applying for CS degrees expecting SE courses and universities adjusted to cater for this. It meant that actual CS degrees seemed sparse for a while.
Yes, there are courses on Java and C/C++ (and also LATEX, MATLAB and Prolog!), but these are a few out of 60 courses in total, which include things like algorithms, information theory, distributed systems and optimizing compilers.
...although maybe Cambridge isn't a "standard" CS degree?
Firstly yes, Cambridge isn't "standard". It gets to assume its graduates will likely be employed because hey, Oxbridge degree, and in a STEM subject too, so it needn't care about "employability".
Both Oxford and Cambridge currently begin with an ML as first language (Cambridge chooses Ocaml), for the reasons I was taught an ML first too. These languages have sound fundamentals, their type system is good, they can handle recursion and other natural ways to express software. Also, almost none of the entrants know an ML [this will have started to change somewhat because of Rust] and so the introductory material holds everybody's attention and you don't need to spend as much time breaking bad habits.
Places which begin with just Java need to wrestle with the fact that Java has some very weird assumptions which you need to either mention but move past or else ignore and then they leave a weird hole in the knowledge of your students. (For now) All Java's user defined types live on the heap - that's very weird, do you call it out?. Some of your cohort know this language well, and so they can do your exercises without paying attention and they lose interest right at the start of your course which isn't good. But others are new to programming entirely as well as Java, for them every concept you introduce is a general idea - this isn't "How variables work in Java" for them it's "How variables work". Beware the resulting prejudices you have created.
This is exactly it. A language is a tool for engineering. I still have a soft sport for Erlang and it would make a lot of sense in many places I work on now, but it has to be seen in totality. Something that includes the entire ecosystem and thus we are not using it at the moment.
Maybe experience with language enthusiasts? When a language has fewer users, the users that it has are more likely to be enthusiasts.
Reminds about me I was talking to a company at a booth. They were using Java and up comes this guy who started professing that that was all wrong and they should rewrite their whole stack in Lisp.
I guess you’ll become allergic to minority programming languages if that happens often enough.
> Reminds about me I was talking to a company at a booth. They were using Java and up comes this guy who started professing that that was all wrong and they should rewrite their whole stack in Lisp.
I frequently get told that the newest version of the JVM can do everything the Erlang VM can do and I should consider switching. Even here, in the comments of hacker news, I've witnessed JVM fanboys proclaim that Erlang, if "properly" implemented, for the JVM, would be faster and more performant then the Erlang VM.
From my experience a lot of Java guys have no idea about the wider world of languages out there. They can be total experts in Java and get very confused why you are not writing something in Java.
The vast majority of programmers don't read HN, reddit or really follow any industry news. They work in Java or C# which are entirely self sufficient with very comprehensive SDKs.
It's a pretty big leap though to take someone's academic interests as an indicator about their ability to do work. If that guy sees that I took two semesters of medieval history, is he going to be afraid that I'll turn the workplace into a Renaissance fair?
Having to hide your interests to look more bland might be the saddest thing I read today. I Just imagine that those recruiters have some sort of list of subversive activities.
1. Was an active member of the Red Army Faction OR
2. Read a book about Erlang or Lisp, is now too dangerous to be reintroduced into the general developer population
A link to a github account is far more valuable IMO. If you have nothing on github (or another code sharing service), then you probably don't have a passion for software.
> There are enough young enthusiasts who will rewrite something to weird tech without asking
This is a communication problem, and not something you can infer from a CV.
I can't see why having experience with any particular language would be a bad thing—quite the contrary. There are concepts to learn from each language, and the more languages under an engineer's belt (particularly "weird" languages), the more open they are to novel solutions. The tool analogy works well: you would want someone who's familiar with an axe and a chisel, and not only a hammer.
Someone thinking this is a bad thing shouldn't be making hiring decisions. It speaks more of the company, so OP probably dodged a bullet.
The software industry is for sure not the only industry where people confuse the quality of their tools for the quality of the job, and go looking for nails that match their preferred hammer instead of focusing on doing a good job of the task at hand.
However it might be one of the only professions where this tool-obsession is so valorized and where there's a whole subculture of it, and where it proliferates at such a high rate. There are people who've made half their career out of chasing the technology of the month or advising that a rewrite in language/framework/technique will solve all problems.
It's of course natural because we talk about the tech industry, and so people become focused on the technology rather than its application to human problems, or see all problems as a technology choice issue rather than a issue of implementing business logic with technology choices... So it depends on the discipline of the engineer how deep down that rabbit hole people go, and the quality of management about how well they can keep their staff focused on the problem domain first, and tools second.
All this to say: I've been that engineer, I've also suffered from those engineers, and because of that I'm now careful. I think Erlang is great. And my career now is Rust. But I hope I'm wise enough to recognize that how harmful rewrite in X and if only this was built in X can be to customers' projects and budgets.
Not to say the original-comment was that person, or that the person sneering about the Erlang was right, but I do understand where the wariness comes from.
All that said, I have more fear of the proliferation of novel JS frameworks than I do of stuff like Erlang or Lisp. And Java is another place where esp in the early days the proliferation of frameworks-as-solutions was a real problem.
He kept asking "why use this over Java at my work X". He seemed to have the idea I wanted to join his company and rewrite their web administrative tools used by 5 people in Erlang. Not sure why he got so annoyed, and didn't ask me about anything other than a language he thought was silly!