Thanks for your suggestion, I will definitely look into erlang. I have tried to look into it but I have found it quite unapproachable. You have to be really motivated on your own to learn it.
Everytime someone points a erlang, they bring up whatsapp. And everytime they do that, I tell them facebook the company that owns it is a php shop (Atleast, that was the core driver. Things might be different today with hiphop).
Writing something in PHP made sense in 2004. Although Erlang was around at the time, it wasn't at all well known.
And no, you are not absolutely right, Facebook is not a PHP (only) shop. Their chat backend is in Erlang and that's a much bigger tell-tale than their legacy code.
Also, a lot of us Erlangers speculate that Facebook bought WhatsApp (not only but also) because of their huge infrastructure know-how and (Erlang) talent.
Not true anymore. They switched away from Erlang because of reliability and scaling problems. So saying that mega-user server side is a solved problem because of Erlang feels like a stretch.
Thanks. Sounds like they didn't really figure out what the problem was with the Erlang implementation but instead reimplemented with C++ systems that were existing, built in-house, and better understood. Makes total sense but shouldn't be taken as a point for or against Erlang as much as it's a point for using a stack your team is familiar with (or has a deep motivation to get familiar with).
> Isn't that argument bad for erlang? That you need to pay an atrocious price for erlang know how.
That erlang know-how commands a high price on the market is a good argument for developers to invest in developing that know how, and for organizations to work on fostering it in their staff.
Its only "bad for erlang" if you assume the only way to adopt erlang is for an organization to wake up out of the blue one day and decide "from this day forth, all our work will be in Erlang, and we're going to go out on the market today and hire up Erlang talent to enable that to occur."
Everytime someone points a erlang, they bring up whatsapp. And everytime they do that, I tell them facebook the company that owns it is a php shop (Atleast, that was the core driver. Things might be different today with hiphop).