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Is Erlang Still Used

Is Erlang still used

Is Erlang Still Used

Yes, Erlang is still used and there are many important applications that run on Erlang.

Erlang is a general-purpose, concurrent programming language commonly used for the development of real-time systems.

It is also widely used in telecoms, banking, e-commerce, computer telephony, and instant messaging.


According to a Stack Overflow survey of 2023, Erlang is used by 0.99% of developers, an increase of 0.09% from 2022.

Since its development by Joe Armstrong, Robert Virding, and Mike Williams in 1986, Erlang grew in popularity and usage in telecom and other real-time systems.

But in recent times, its popularity has drastically decreased due to the emergence of newer, feature-rich, and easy-to-use programming languages.

WHO USES ERLANG IN PRODUCTION

There are many popular applications and companies that use Erlang in production, some of them include

  • WhatsApp
  • IBM
  • Samsung
  • Nintendo
  • BT Mobile
  • Heroku
  • GoDaddy
  • Cisco
  • Erlang Solution
  • Grindr
  • IRC Cloud
  • EMQ Technologies
  • RedBus
  • Couchbase
  • AdRoll
  • Erisata
  • Evolution Gaming
  • 8×8
  • RedClaw Technologies
  • Octavo Labs
  • Motorola Solution
  • Alert Logic
  • Klarna
  • Ericsson
  • Goldman Sachs
  • Bet 365, and many others

It can be seen that Erlang is still trusted and used by a lot of big companies and businesses.

ERLANG’S POPULARITY

Although Erlang is a highly capable, feature-rich programming language with over 30 years of development, its popularity has been decreasing over the years.


According to a Stack Overflow survey of 2023, Erlang is the 37th most commonly used programming language. It is used by 0.99% of developers.

Despite its popularity decreasing, Erlang is still admired by a lot of developers. Erlang is admired by 55.18% of developers (2023 Stack Overflow Survey).

IS LEARN ERLANG WORTH IT

Yes, Erlang is worth learning because there are a lot of big companies that still use it and they need Erlang developers to work on these codebases.

Erlang is among the high-paying programming language because there are few talented Erlang developers.

According to a 2023 Stack Overflow survey of top-paying programming languages, Erlang developers are the 2nd highest-paid developers.

They get a median salary of $99,492 per year, higher than developers who use popular languages like Python, C++, Go, Rust, Java, PHP, and many others.

Glassdoor reported that in the United States, Erlang Developers with 1 – 3 years of experience get an estimated total pay of $114,440 per year.

Erlang Programmer Salary

Learning Erlang puts you among some of the most highly-paid developers in the industry. Although Erlang is not as popular as it used to be, Learning Erlang can help you to earn more.

WHAT IS ERLANG GOOD FOR?

Erlang is good for developing real-time systems, telecommunications systems, instant messaging apps, banking, and finance applications.

Erlang’s runtime system has built-in support for concurrency, distribution, and fault tolerance. It is good for systems that require high availability.

Erlang is designed with a mechanism that makes it easy for external processes to monitor for crashes (or hardware failures).

“If somebody came to me and wanted to pay me a lot of money to build a large-scale message handling system that really had to be up all the time, could never afford to go down for years at a time, I would unhesitatingly choose Erlang to build it in.”

Tim Bray

Also read, Should I use Shopify or make my own Website

SHOULD I USE ERLANG IN 2023

If you are starting a project from scratch or building a product for your company, using Erlang may not be the best approach, this is because there are few Erlang developers these days.

Finding talented Erlang developers to work with may not be easy. If you do find and hire Erlang developers, most of them will need a higher salary.

Erlang developers can be expensive to hire, if you are starting a project from scratch, consider using languages that have a large pool of talented developers who you can easily hire.

If you want to tap into some of the features of Erlang, you make consider using Elixir.

Elixir is a programming language that compiles into BEAM byte code (via Erlang Abstract Format). Elixir has modern features and it’s easy to work with that Erlang.

Also read Elixir Web Development

IS ERLANG A DEAD LANGUAGE

No, Erlang is not a dead language. Although its popularity has decreased, Erlang is still actively maintained and updated.

Erlang has been around for more than three decades and has an active community of users and developers.

Many companies like Cisco, IBM, GoDaddy, Heroku, Klarna, Couchbase, WhatsApp, Goldman Sachs, Ericsson, Motorola, etc. use Erlang to power some of their critical applications.

CONCLUSION

Erlang is still used by companies and individual developers. There are still a huge number of systems and applications that rely on Erlang to work effectively.

Many companies still need Erlang developers to maintain their Erlang codebase. Erlang developers are among the highest-paid developers in the industry which acts as motivation for other developers to learn Erlang.

Is Erlang Still Used
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