"You wouldn't perchance know what the 'Er' in 'Erlang' is short for, would you?"

Oooooh!! I know this one! Ericsson!

Do I get a prize?

I personally don't mind academic.

However, part of my response was that Ericsson had been using it industrially since the 90s, and that in fact Erlang was actually less academic than Python or Go. The recruiter handwaved this as "well, it's an academic language".

You totally dodged a bullet.

Even if the company despises Erlang for whatever reasons, it's still very valuable for them to examine and be educated about it. Erlang makes tradeoffs for X optimizing for Y, we'll choose a different tradeoff since we're optimizing for Z.

Once I interviewed at a company with many competitors. I continually asked "how will this company succeed while the competitors have a ten year head start? What choices do we make that the others didn't?". I got blank stares. Literally nobody was interested in examining the competitive landscape.

Oh, I've had that, too. I've interviewed with a few companies that create products that are literally years of research behind their (sometimes free) competitors. And don't realize, typically because they don't have the skill to even comprehend the difference.

And for fun, all these companies interviewed me on cloud development, rather than on their core offering, despite the fact that I actually happen to know a thing or two about said branch (i.e. I have both a PhD and commercial experience in the domain).

One of the things that makes Erlang so practical is that it is not an academic language.

I’m guessing it’s probably the prolog-like syntax that gets it thrown in to that category by some. I’ve never heard someone consider Elixir “academic”.

Well, it tells you those things about that specific interviewer.