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> As an Erlang developer for the past couple years now, I love seeing the adoption and excitement around Elixir and the BEAM. I will admit I always shudder when

> As an Erlang developer for the past couple years now, I love seeing the adoption and excitement around Elixir and the BEAM. I will admit I always shudder when people very quickly call out on Erlang's syntax as a reason not to use it. Feels like a pretty lame excuse... I have mixed feelings here. From a purely implementation standpoint I totally agree - I don't particularly enjoy using certain tools at work but that is not a valid excuse for me to not get work done. At the same time, as a psych grad turned developer, I'm intimately aware of the effect that dreading a journey can have on attaining a goal and this is no less true of mapping developer experience to productivity - thus we should always be striving to make sure that the goals of the team are not undermined by the requirements to get there. If I had an objective that couldn't be solved in Elixir I would invest time in groking Erlang but its syntax does deter me from wanting to make that investment until I need to. > All that said however, it kind of bugs me when I see posts like this (no matter the language) that go somewhere along the lines of "I managed to introduce language X and it was all rainbows and unicorns! Everybody loves it and work is fun again". Totally agree, especially with your points on the gen_* family which are all vastly useful once you understand them but took me some time to bridge that gap. I feel that it's just as important to understand the pain points such that others reading this post and wanting to be the catalyst for similar change can prepare for these issues themselves should they ever want to take the leap.

keithnoizu 8y ago
I did erlang programming for about a year before switching to elixir for the last 3 years. I have a large server cluster serving 275k sensor devices averaging one report per minute containing 1 to 4 readings (temp, humidity, rainfall, wind speed, heading, etc.) calculating daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, hourly, and smaller high/low/average/tally aggregates and allowing users to setup complex alerts against these values. It would have take me a huge amount longer to write the same in erlang. The difference between readability and usability of Elixir and Erlang syntax is night and day, especially as someone coming from 20 years of working with imperative languages. I can feel comfortable handing out small tasks to a lay developer in elixir and getting back a response pretty quickly, it has a much easier on boarding. It has it's flaws of course. It's much easier to write programs that will crash in elixir, etc. but that concession with a more approachable syntax and methodology coupled with the benefits of OTP and Beam seems like a much more compelling sell than pure erlang.

keithnoizu 8y ago

I did erlang programming for about a year before switching to elixir for the last 3 years. I have a large server cluster serving 275k sensor devices averaging one report per minute containing 1 to 4 readings (temp, humidity, rainfall, wind speed, heading, etc.) calculating daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, hourly, and smaller high/low/average/tally aggregates and allowing users to setup complex alerts against these values. It would have take me a huge amount longer to write the same in erlang. The difference between readability and usability of Elixir and Erlang syntax is night and day, especially as someone coming from 20 years of working with imperative languages. I can feel comfortable handing out small tasks to a lay developer in elixir and getting back a response pretty quickly, it has a much easier on boarding. It has it's flaws of course. It's much easier to write programs that will crash in elixir, etc. but that concession with a more approachable syntax and methodology coupled with the benefits of OTP and Beam seems like a much more compelling sell than pure erlang.