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Comment by hamilyon2 | Hacker News Reader

Could it be true, erlang and clojure are assuciated with higher income both worldwide and in US? A little back, I remember, functional programming was thought as academic and not fit for production. Has that changed? This is interesting and almost too good to be true.

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Erlang has been used for decades in telcom, ATM, and financial software and probably much more. It was literally invented to be used in a production telcom system.

> Has that changed?

Very much so, and not just functional languages. In addition the increasing adoption of functional languages into the "real world," Javascript is commonly written in functional style these days, even before we touch things like Clojurescript, Elm, PureScript, or ReasonML.

n=1 I am a clojure web consultant http://www.hyperfiddle-consulting.com/ (Hopefully not distasteful/shilling, just relevant context)

Markets have weird corners that move over time and for a while I made all my money doing React.js work. I make more than all of my peers, probably because I have a great portfolio, another correlation-but-not-causation. But does it really surprise anyone that the 24 year old who read Haskell books instead of netflix-n-chill, grew up to find more competitive opportunities?

I did eventually break through the freelancing rate ceiling by building a Clojure ecosystem product and offering product-related consulting now.

If WhatsApp manages to use Erlang at quite a scale I guess it's not that academic?

I suppose a lot of our phone calls and data traffic are handled by Erlang code. I don't think it was ever "academic" except in, perhaps, the sense it was exhaustively thought out.

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