This post perfectly sums up a mindset I detest. Engineers get shit done and don't care about whatever the most recent hipster programming language is. They can probably spell "mediocrity" as well.

I'm with you.

I really don't think people with that mindset could put together the sort of shit we do on the enterprise mindset side of things. The tools are carefully picked to be entirely the opposite to the contrarian mindset.

So we have a system that has about 500 HTTP endpoints, 600 service endpoints, 4MLoC, several TiB of data, several TiB of documents, handles 5000 concurrent users 24/7 ramping up to 2 million euro consumers (not concurrent) and 10 full 42U racks of kit in two facilities. Oh and strict security isolation through several layers.

Java+c# is the only answer.

But 50 times a day someone says, hey rewrite it all in Ruby and Monogo. That's a joke.

Out of curiosity does your system need to be this complex? Could it have broken down into smaller sub-systems that maybe aren't as integrated, but get the job basically done?

70% of this is required to be this complex as the sector we work in is very rule and workflow heavy and the customisation support is immensely complicated. 30% is hacked in stuff for single clients and legacy stuff from the dark ages that we had to hang on to.

We're breaking it down into tiny subsystems at the moment i.e. moving to a microservices architecture. I'm describing the "monolith" that we're starting from.

In time it'll have 1/2 the code, 2-5x the throughput and significantly less cost.

How come that most of recent 3G and 4G GSM systems runs Erlang order of magnitude more efficiently?

Good question. It's not about efficiency; it's about productivity. It would be impossible to build a system of this complexity for the budget specified with Erlang. This is not a limit of Erlang but a limit of who we have available to build it and run the platform.

I'd rather be using Erlang or Common Lisp myself.

Tell us that you at least use nginx at these 500 HTTP endpoints, not servlets...)

No we don't use nginx. F5 big-ips in front of a large IIS cluster serving through WCF + ASP.Net MVC.

Exactly! The very term you use is telling - "shit" is exactly what comes out of Java sweatshops. They call it Enterprise Software - write once, run away.

BTW, how many languages do you speak well enough to hold an intelligent conversation?

That was really offensive. I hardly see the need for personal insults.