My question is why hire by language? Why not get good engineers and have them ramp up? I understand that for many projects this is not desired, particularly in a HR-rich environment, but if the project is erlang-based, there is likely lots to learn there.

Is it not fair to presume that a good engineer will pick up the language, or are we stuck in the resume framework of n years of ---bol?

This seems to be how a lot of companies that are interested in Erlang end up hiring. If your company, or whatever member of your company is sneaking Erlang in under the radar, is plugged into the community it is not too hard to find Erlang talent. As a lot of people have learned over the past couple of years, it is not hard to pick up Erlang if you really want to. Recently I have been noticing a lot of job posting where Erlang is listed among the "it would be really nice if you knew this" part of the job requirements. As Erlang starts to become more of a distributed/concurrent glue languages I expect to see more job ads like these.

Erlang is a quirky DSL for a seasoned actor system. That's my impression 10 years ago. It still makes sense now despite all the recent hypes.

I haven't had any experience with Erlang so I decided to give it a try.

I got about three sentences into the tutorial when I encountered "Remember to terminate every expression with a DOT followed by a whitespace!"

At this point I stopped and will never try it again.

I think I left Prolog in my other pants...