There's a cryptocurrency project I'm considering contributing to that's written in Erlang. I'm curious about Erlang's usefulness in other contexts. Is it a language that can open doors for you (job-wise)?
There are plenty of companies using erlang in production. The community is relatively small and almost everyone knows each other. Yes, you can find erlang jobs or elixir jobs - a lot of those these days (PM me if you are looking)<p>Besides, erlang definitely gives you new perspective in building large scale system; supervision tree (let it crash), the actor concept, message passing, preemptive vm, built-in distributed erlang nodes, the repl, hot code swapping - any much more<p>The power comes from the whole ecosystem. Concurrency is built from ground up on language & vm level.
Erlang itself is pretty hard to find work in, though not impossible.<p>That said, it's an interesting platform that is a lot of fun, and its concepts can be applied to a lot of different platforms. Its inherent "treat everything as a self-contained service" turns out to be a fairly useful way to structure applications.
There are not many Erlangs jobs, but as only the more determined developers bother to learn it, you can expect better qualified co-workers in an Erlang shop compared to an average/popular language shop. (Generally true with other niche languages too.) So, once you find an Erlang job chances are good that you will like it. Also it as a language to beat the averages TODAY. <a href="http://paulgraham.com/avg.html" rel="nofollow">http://paulgraham.com/avg.html</a>
Honestly, once you learn 5 or 6 languages, picking up a new one (not as a deep expert, but enough to functionally contribute to an open source project) takes only a day or so.<p>If you are not there yet, take every opportunity to learn a new language, doesn't really matter which as long as you have a good breadth (e.g. don't do entirely functional languages).