i've shared this story on here before, but years ago i worked for a startup where we had a janky homegrown distributed system cobbled together from a mix of python, rabbitmq and state stored in postgres tables. four of us, two senior and two junior engineers, decided to see if we could learn erlang and build a more coherent and well-engineered replacement for it. it took us four months, starting from never having used the language, to learn our way around it and set up a proof of concept that was both more performant and more stable than the existing system. and this was all while doing our regular work as well. erlang is an extremely simple language to learn and become productive with, especially if the task you're trying to do fits the grain of the language and beam environment.
(ironically, the erlang solution never went anywhere because management decided they did not want to take a chance on a lesser-used language. but from a getting employees standpoint it's perfectly feasible to hire people who are simply good engineers in whatever language and give them a month to learn erlang.)
(ironically, the erlang solution never went anywhere because management decided they did not want to take a chance on a lesser-used language. but from a getting employees standpoint it's perfectly feasible to hire people who are simply good engineers in whatever language and give them a month to learn erlang.)