[erlang-questions] Time for OTP to be Renamed?

[Miles Fidelman]

Re.
>>> Sort of makes me wonder what I am doing here and what I have spent the last 2 weeks of my free time doing. I could write my project in Lisp an achieve the same result and I already know Lisp fairly well.
>>>
>>> Honestly this whole thread is making me think back to the first thread I posted in this community and making me wonder if it would not be better to go down the road of Scala instead. Even though that community is not what Id call friendly, I can staff a Scala project with talented Java / Ruby / Node.js / Clojure people. With the general sense in the Erlang community I could hardly blame the developer that said "I'm not interested in your project because Erlang is useless to my resume."
>>>
>>> Hmm definitely food for thought.
>>>
>>>
>>> *Robert Simmons Jr. MSc. - Lead Java Architect @ EA*
>>>

Seems to me that scarcity is a GOOD thing for Erlang programmers. Java 
coders are a dime a dozen (not necessarily good ones, mind you).  Folks 
who know Erlang are harder to find - should drive the price up.

On a related note:
- There's still a good demand for COBOL programmers - lots of old 
systems to maintain, and they're not making a lot of new COBOL coders.
- Remember ADA?  It's got a LOT of traction for mission-critical 
systems.  I expect there's a lot of good work for ADA coders in building 
SCADA systems these days.

On other hand, I'm not sure that "Lead Java Architect @ EA" is that 
great a resume item - 'You write games in Java?  Bwa ha ha ha ha.' [As 
background - I discovered Erlang while working at a company that writes 
simulation engines for massively multi-player military trainers; as a 
systems engineer and business developer, not a programmer mind you.  
When I started digging into how we wrote our engine, I was expecting a 
process per simulated object (e.g., a tank) - I come from a network 
services background - where we spawn a process for everything.  When the 
response was 'c++ object per tank,' w/ 4 main processes that loop 
through each object, every simulation loop my reaction was "that's 
nuts."  (And it was - the amount of spaghetti code was absurd, and 
changes to one object model would ripple everywhere.)  When I was told 
that it was the only way to do things, that process swapping would drive 
a 1000-tank sim. to its knees otherwise, I said "bulls*&t" and started 
hunting around.  It didn't take a lot of googling on "massive 
concurrency" to find Erlang.]

Short version:  If I were hiring for a project that was inherently 
concurrent, and required 24x7 operation - I'd be LOOKING for Erlang on a 
resume.  Someone who spent most of their time coding Java would be a 
non-starter.

Miles Fidelman



-- 
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.   .... Yogi Berra