By not using the word Telecom.
Discord, fintech, and sportsbetting also use BEAM pretty heavily.
Also 100% would avoid hiring you with the elixir comment.
Ask HN: Erlang and the telecom market
11–20 of 59 posts
Re: Ask HN: Erlang and the telecom market
#12The generalist view is that nobody is using Erlang for modern telco workloads anymore.
(yes, there are exceptions. Bear with me)
I learned Erlang when we were programming Ericsson voice switches some twenty years ago, and even though Nokia also adopted OTP and did some pretty amazing things with it (including a Hadoop analogue that used Erlang to coordinate Python workers across nodes), I have only come across Erlang when looking at legacy workloads that needed to be moved to the cloud.
NFV and CNF efforts (i.e., virtualized and containerized network functions) I've come across over the past few years seem to be mostly Go or C++. Jaeger is a common tool. I see a lot of Postgres. I also see really weird CNI approaches (check out multus, because telcos still can't get over having dedicated network interfaces for things even though it's all just a virtualization sandwich and they really should just learn to use network policies).
The technicalities run deeper than web apps (because some thing are very, very finely tuned), but the key point is that the telco "bleeding edge" landscape is now indistinguishable from "web scale" K8s discussions, except that telco workloads demand fixed resource allocations nd we still rely _a lot_ on CPU pinning of specific functions due to latency/jitter sensitive workloads.
It's almost like you took low-latency, pseudo-real-time stuff from embedded systems and shoved it into K8s. No, wait, it's _exactly_ like that.
Source: I work in Azure for Operators and have been in the telco industry since the mid-90s.
Re: Ask HN: Erlang and the telecom market
#13This is the problem I have with Erlang developers. They only want to work on Erlang. Pragmatism be damned. It is never about the product or the company. It is only about which of the remaining 20 Erlang expert personalities in the world do they get to work alongside with. If there needs to be a special library, all other existing ones are garbage unless written by one of the 20 above, so they will just write their own. I hate to stereotype here, but I would never ever (again) bet my company on Erlang. It is insanely difficult to recruit for. They are truly some of the best developers in the world, but lack pragmatism for problems and every one problem can only be solved with functional programming using Erlang. In my experience, Erlang developers are Zealots for the language and nothing else. If your company decides to pivot away from Erlang to another more accessible language, say Go, you are likely to lose them all.
Re: Ask HN: Erlang and the telecom market
#14> screw Elixir by the way
This is 100% what is keeping you from getting hired. Folks who use BEAM don’t care if someone is using Erlang or Elixir or LFE or whatever… we care about the problems. This is why we are all on BEAM to begin with. Your immaturity shows you lack the experience to meaningfully understand this. You’re still obsessing with the superficial instead of the problem. Almost everywhere using BEAM is going to be dominated by senior+ engineers who just don’t want to put up with someone who is so assuredly lacking experience.
Your hubris is stunning by the way, to not see your attitude is the problem, I can say I would absolutely never want to work with you… and I’ve been writing for BEAM professionally for 7 years, software development for 15+ years.
Re: Ask HN: Erlang and the telecom market
#15This is the problem I have with Erlang developers. They only want to work on Erlang. Pragmatism be damned. It is never about the product or the company. It is only about which of the remaining 20 Erlang expert personalities in the world do they get to work alongside with. If there needs to be a special library, all other existing ones are garbage unless written by one of the 20 above, so they will just write their ow…
If it makes you feel better, a lot of COBOL programmers actually wish it was extinct, because some of the systems they're maintaining are multiple decades old by now.
I suspect that if it wasn't for the virtualization drive behind 5G, Erlang would follow suit as a highly paid legacy language.
As it is, since many legacy telco systems are actually being replaced entirely by virtualized solutions, I see older companies still developing in it, but all hedging their bets on other things (I already mentioned C++ in another thread, but Go and Rust, backed by suitable frameworks that employ Raft and other sync/HA protocols, seem to be in the forefront).
Re: Ask HN: Erlang and the telecom market
#16Have you considered these guys yet? https://www.2600hz.com/careers
Re: Ask HN: Erlang and the telecom market
#17The generalist view is that nobody is using Erlang for modern telco workloads anymore. (yes, there are exceptions. Bear with me) I learned Erlang when we were programming Ericsson voice switches some twenty years ago, and even though Nokia also adopted OTP and did some pretty amazing things with it (including a Hadoop analogue that used Erlang to coordinate Python workers across nodes), I have only come across Erlang…
Are there any good reading on modern work being done in telecom networks. I enjoyed this comment and have had a passing interest in the industry, but have been unable to understand modern networks so far.
Re: Ask HN: Erlang and the telecom market
#18> screw Elixir by the way If OP is reading… care to elaborate in a more objective fashion? As an Elixir neophyte, one of the things that is a small frustration for me is that you’ll get to a problem and there just is no solution, and when you ask on the wonderful slack channel, someone will pipe up with a bit Erlang you use for that. It’d be like learning Japanese, and for sizeable pieces of your communication, your…
I learnt Erlang when it was still cool. And more recently (but not that recently) dabbled with learning Elixir.
Most resources are targeting those who don't come from Erlang (mostly it was from rails). And my word are they being deceived.
I don't think the Japanese/Latin analogy quite works it's like elixir is rhyming slang and Erlang is english.
But everyone insists you can get by with rhyming slang alone. Errr. Nope!
Re: Ask HN: Erlang and the telecom market
#19The generalist view is that nobody is using Erlang for modern telco workloads anymore. (yes, there are exceptions. Bear with me) I learned Erlang when we were programming Ericsson voice switches some twenty years ago, and even though Nokia also adopted OTP and did some pretty amazing things with it (including a Hadoop analogue that used Erlang to coordinate Python workers across nodes), I have only come across Erlang…
Excellent points. I work in telco though mainly on business web services side but what you said is about same I heard in here on network side.
Re: Ask HN: Erlang and the telecom market
#20The generalist view is that nobody is using Erlang for modern telco workloads anymore. (yes, there are exceptions. Bear with me) I learned Erlang when we were programming Ericsson voice switches some twenty years ago, and even though Nokia also adopted OTP and did some pretty amazing things with it (including a Hadoop analogue that used Erlang to coordinate Python workers across nodes), I have only come across Erlang…
I used to experiment a bunch with GPU passthrough to VMs and also found that CPU pinning was required to avoid stutters. I always found it unfortunate as pinning works directly against what one tries to achieve with virtualization (i.e. sharing of resources).
I had never considered telecom suffering from the same issue. Do you know if there's been any work to improve scheduling to mitigate this requirement?