How And Why We Switched from Erlang to Python (2011)
I was an intern at Mixpanel at the time (but not the author of this article or involved in the discussed rewrite). For context, the company was then <10 people. (I'm surprised to see anything from my first professional software experience on top of HN!)<p>My recollection of events (of 8 years ago):
The Erlang endpoint was written a year or two earlier as someone's first Erlang project, in a tiny org with no Erlang experience. The endpoint worked well enough and people moved onto other projects in the mostly Python codebase. Eventually, it became painful to debug or add features to this endpoint because no one was particularly proficient in Erlang. Ankur (author of the post, intern) then rewrote it in Python.<p>I wouldn't read this as a negative about Erlang or a positive article about Python. I'd instead read it as "use a language that makes sense for your organization and already existing codebase".