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I forget where I read that there were estimated to be only about 1K professional Erlang coders in the world. That seems absurdly low. Does anyone believe this is actually true?

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Incorrect, it probably got confused with the number of Erlang developers at Ericsson. Not all use it on a daily basis, but estimates on their developers, testers and system integrators is in that range.

If true, it's astounding so few programmers wrote systems that handle such astounding amounts of data.

That's what people used to think of Symbolics Lisp machines. Customers would assume Symbolics had a team of thousands of programmers, when really it was about a dozen.

One of my favorite CS profs had one of those. I remember visiting his office hours so he could show it off to me.

I didn't do well in the class (it was a bit out of my league at the time) but I ended up in a career in software dev anyway

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