I'm at an Erlang company; it's hard to find people who already know Erlang, most of our server hires (including me) are smart people who are willing to learn a new language. Coming from a mostly PHP/Perl with a bit of C background, Erlang is weird, but it's a great fit for our use case. I haven't played with any other FP languages, but it seems like Erlang is more pragmatic than most, it's easy to have side effects, and the OTP libraries include a lot of useful stuff.
Anyway, we have enough non-core stuff (the mostly static website, resource translations etc) floating around that's not in Erlang that having people around who used PHP or Python in a former life is a good thing. :)
Where do you work? If you don't mind me asking. I'm always curious as to what companies use Erlang. My interest in he language came from Elixir, now I can't stop playing around with Erlang/Elixir.
We still use it for our new product (marketing tool for the music industry) but while it certainly works for us, we no longer have to support tons of simultaneous connections to our servers. The backend tech could almost be anything.
Ah neat, I used Soundrop when it was around. You guys should do a write up on the architecture now that it's closed down. Any material on in production BEAM apps are gems for me.
Thanks for having used Soundrop! :) A write up of our architecture (and its many rewrites) is in our backlog but don't hold your horses, right now you are focused on building our new product.
Anyway, we have enough non-core stuff (the mostly static website, resource translations etc) floating around that's not in Erlang that having people around who used PHP or Python in a former life is a good thing. :)