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I experience this depression constantly. It's very rare to find people or places using Erlang, the community is extremely small and seemingly getting smaller a

I experience this depression constantly. It's very rare to find people or places using Erlang, the community is extremely small and seemingly getting smaller all the time, and new things attempting to approximate its core strengths (often badly or incompletely) keep coming to the market and only further exacerbating the situation. So I end up stuck working with crappier tech, crappier tools, and dealing with the effects of fewer and fewer resources going into improving the last 5% of annoying things about Erlang. While a deluge of resources go into partially reinventing the first 50% of it over and over again in some other random language.

im_down_w_otp 10y ago
Having now read the entirety of the originally linked post... I'm doubly depressed. Erlang would have been a great fit for Pusher's problem space. Blargh! :-(
Veen 10y ago
What are your thoughts on Elixir?
- im_down_w_otp 10y ago
  It's fine. Parts of it seem really weird to me. Agents don't seem like they should be in the standard library. The pipe operator should probably have some sugar for representing the first implicit argument to the function because it's weird to have things like Enum.map/2 become written as Enum.map/1 in that context. Protocols are bizarrely complex (you can do the same thing in Erlang with about 10% of the ceremony) and made weirder by the fact that structs are represented as maps with a special key instead of as records, so field access and key walking has an unnecessary amount of overhead comparatively. It doesn't feel "complete", because there are pretty big chunks of the underlying system that still make you extremely aware you're really running atop Erlang (debugging, tracing, profiling, etc.), up to and including the docs themselves which often just point you straight to the relevant Erlang documentation. I like that it has brought a lot of new energy to the BEAM ecosystem. I like the tooling and focus on docs and testing that have come with it. I like the macro system, even though I think it's overused by the community and often to ill effect, but the system itself is much cleaner than Erlang's. tl;dr... Sure, why not. :-)

im_down_w_otp 10y ago

Having now read the entirety of the originally linked post... I'm doubly depressed. Erlang would have been a great fit for Pusher's problem space. Blargh! :-(

Veen 10y ago

What are your thoughts on Elixir?

im_down_w_otp 10y ago
It's fine. Parts of it seem really weird to me. Agents don't seem like they should be in the standard library. The pipe operator should probably have some sugar for representing the first implicit argument to the function because it's weird to have things like Enum.map/2 become written as Enum.map/1 in that context. Protocols are bizarrely complex (you can do the same thing in Erlang with about 10% of the ceremony) and made weirder by the fact that structs are represented as maps with a special key instead of as records, so field access and key walking has an unnecessary amount of overhead comparatively. It doesn't feel "complete", because there are pretty big chunks of the underlying system that still make you extremely aware you're really running atop Erlang (debugging, tracing, profiling, etc.), up to and including the docs themselves which often just point you straight to the relevant Erlang documentation. I like that it has brought a lot of new energy to the BEAM ecosystem. I like the tooling and focus on docs and testing that have come with it. I like the macro system, even though I think it's overused by the community and often to ill effect, but the system itself is much cleaner than Erlang's. tl;dr... Sure, why not. :-)