Hello everyone and welcome back to the Cognixia podcast. Every week, we dig up a new topic from emerging digital technologies and share insights, ideas, information, stories, and more. We strive to inspire our listeners to learn new things and update their repertoire of skills to stay relevant and continue growing in their careers.
In today’s episode, we talk about a programming language that has gained a lot of prominence in recent times – ErLang. While most of us have always been convinced that artificial generative intelligence would commonly be written in Python or Rust, it might surprise you that neither of these are the highest-paid programming languages this year. The Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2024 just released its report and the top spot goes to neither Rust nor Python, but to ErLang. Interestingly, this is not a new occurrence. ErLang has enjoyed the top stop for a few years now. In 2024, the median salary for ErLang developers is reported as $100,636; in 2023, this number was $99,492. It is surprising not because it’s a blip that a developer makes that much, but because ErLang has had quite a low adoption rate but it is still a very powerful language, making it a very valuable skill in the industry.
If you have never heard of ErLang, allow us to give you a little background.
According to the ErLang official website, ErLang is a programming language used to build massively scalable soft real-time systems with requirements of high availability. Some of its uses are in telecom, banking, eCommerce, computer telephony, and instant managing. ErLang’s runtime system has built-in support for concurrency, distribution, and fault tolerance. The two main tenets of the language are concurrency and message passing and it offers transparent distribution mechanisms.
ErLang has a set of libraries and design principles called Open Telecom Platform or OTP which provides middleware to develop these systems. It includes its own distributed database, applications to interface with other languages debugging, and release handling tools. OTP is open-source. Most projects that say they are using ErLang are actually using ErLang/OTP, that is, the language as well as the libraries.
ErLang was originally developed at the Ericsson Computer Science Laboratory. ErLang/OTP has been battle-tested in several Ericsson products for building robust fault-tolerant distributed applications. It is exceptionally useful for use cases like controlling a switch, converting protocols, managing mail transfer agents, handling mobility in a mobile network, providing unified messaging, or any situations that require soft real-time behavior. ErLang is exceptionally good at solving these kinds of problems because this is the exact problem domain it was built for. It provides a simple and powerful model for error containment and fault tolerance.
ErLang is used by some very reputed companies like Goldman Sachs, WhatsApp, Amazon, PepsiCo, 2600Hz, AdRoll, Bluetab Solutions, Corelatus, Facebook, Finnish Meteorological Institute, Gambit Research, IDT Corp, Klarna, Lindenbaum, Quviq, RabbitMQ, Smarkets, Telia, Wavenet, and of course, Ericsson, besides many, many other organizations around the world.
The Stack Overflow survey was pretty straightforward with its queries, leaving no room for ambiguity or vague responses. To capture the compensation, the question was as simple as it could get, it said, “What is your current total annual compensation?” When the responses were analyzed it came to the fore that ErLang developers enjoyed the highest median salaries among their peers. Undoubtedly, the trend is solid enough to pique everyone’s curiosity.
Don’t get us wrong, we are not trying to say that Python and Rust are not worth it or maybe learning them would be a not-so-good idea, that is not what we are saying. What we are actually saying is, despite the immense popularity of Rust and Python, the survey has found that ErLang programming skills could be highly valuable and would be highly sought-after to maintain their tech stacks.
Does the higher salaries reflect the volume of the demand? Not so much. It reflects the value of the skill in the market. ErLang is not as popular or widespread as Python or Rust, and definitely not as much as Java or JavaScript either, but it is highly important in specific industries and companies. ErLang is highly efficient in handling concurrent processes making it an especially critical tool for businesses in telecommunications, banking, and messaging systems. The language is often used in mission-critical applications requiring high concurrency and maintainability. So, while there may not be widespread adoption, wherever it does get used, it is mostly mission-critical and almost indispensable. Moreover, individuals who have this skill are few and far between, which makes them unicorns of sorts, which could also explain the higher paychecks. You could easily find a Python developer or a C developer, but finding an ErLang developer could be hard, and time-consuming, and one would need to look in the right places, it is niche.
Despite that, ErLang’s presence in the programming landscape has been steady. Its demand is neither declining nor growing much. It maintains its reputation as a niche skill, perfect for situations that call for reliability and fault tolerance.
ErLang developers’ demand is all about short supply and steady demand. Having ErLang as one of your skills could be a valuable addition to your resume. There is a demand for robust, scalable languages and ErLang offers a reliable option. Over time, we can see that the demand for ErLang will hold steady and so will the demand for ErLang developers. Jobs for ErLang developers may not be abundant on the regular job boards so finding a job may not be the easiest task, but those with the skills are undoubtedly, handsomely paid.
So, if you are a current or aspiring developer, learning Python or Rust will be excellent, and adding ErLang yet another language you know would be the cherry on the cake. Interesting, isn’t it? So, now you know what to do and what could be another direction to go in or another skill to add to your resume.
And, with that, we come to the end of this week’s episode of the Cognixia podcast. We will be back again next week with another exciting new episode. Until then, happy learning!
