Last edited: 03/21/2025
This is just a quick jot down of an observation I had recently, this is not a full on discovery of my thoughts.
During my last semester I took a non-conventional programming languages course with Dr. Venkat Subramaniam. This course was unconventional because usually the course covers how programming languages are made (lexical parsers, compilers, type systems, etc.), but this one was trying to get as much exposure to as many programming languages we could. The entire course focused on immutability/functional programming and was my first introduction to functional programming. Each assignment needed to use 2-3 different languages and there is usually a constraint on each one like strong/weak typing, static/dynamic, etc. This is where I first used Erlang and found it so different to what I have used in the past that I became very curious about it and that’s when I found Elixir (Brazil mentioned!).
I started reading Elixir in Action and learning more and more about Elixir to where I have started to look at making a multiplayer game with Elixir as the server for it. I could see myself trying to make Elixir the language I focus on for a career for the next few years, but as any new CS grad knows, the job market has been pretty rough. Not only junior / new grad jobs are hard enough to get entry level Elixir jobs are even rarer. This has been partly discouraging, making me feel forced to learn something more widely available for jobs but that still provides me with joy and feel curious to learn. That is when I stumbled upon Go.
Go an exemplary simple language which is great for the backend and networking is very attractive to me since I do want to break into the backend. And looking at the available jobs for golang jobs vs elixir I’m coming to the painful realization that functional programming jobs might exist, but they are most likely not advertised and will have to wait for something either through internal moving or doing my own thing/oss.