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IMO, Erlang/Elixir/BEAM/OTP really is the toolset that can be used to build what the mystical 10x/100x programmer can achieve. But that's also the reason why it

IMO, Erlang/Elixir/BEAM/OTP really is the toolset that can be used to build what the mystical 10x/100x programmer can achieve. But that's also the reason why it's hard to push for its adoption into bigger teams. When the value proposition is "you can do all that by only using Erlang/Elixir/OTP...", while the alternatives are based on multiple, but more "traditional" and well-understood systems (which you are easier to hire for) ,"using one thing for all" sounds more like a risk (and potential tech/dev lock-in) than an advantage to the management. Love to hear success stories of how Erlang/Elixir are pushed into "mainstream" within a relative large org.

Thaxll 6y ago
The problem is that the runtime does too much magic and it's not portable / standard compared to other languages / runtimes. Lot of what BEAM/OTP is doing is done in other tools and it's language neutral. Not everything is good tbh, when you see the pain it is to deploy an Erlang app in 2020 ...
- cutety 6y ago
  Regarding portability, I recently came across this project: https://github.com/spawnfest/bakeware https://github.com/spawnfest/bakeware I haven’t gotten around to actually trying it myself, but it advertises that it can compile Elixir projects into a single binary you can copy, paste & run (on Linux & MacOS). It’s not the greatest solution, and the mentioned ~0.5s startup time doesn’t make it great for cli tools when compared to Go/Rust/C. I’m mostly just happy to see there are people out there trying to make Elixir/Erlang easier to use, as much as I love the language, some of the tooling and deployment methods (releases) make me groan.
- dnautics 6y ago
  is it a pain? mix release Compiles everything, tar/gz's it, sends it to a private s3 bucket. On your server side, you periodically watch the s3 bucket, and when one of your nodes detects a relup, it downloads from the s3 bucket, kills itself. Systemd then restarts it, kicking into the newest version. That's it. This is maybe about 50-100 lines of code, one external library (pick your AWS library of choice), and one systemd script. I think there's even a library for managing systemd from within the BEAM now. If you want to be more sophisticated (a rolling blue-green deploy across an erlang cluster) you could probably do it with transactional locks with the :global module in about an additional 100-ish lines of code, including fully verifying the soundness of newly upgraded nodes using telemetry.

Thaxll 6y ago

The problem is that the runtime does too much magic and it's not portable / standard compared to other languages / runtimes. Lot of what BEAM/OTP is doing is done in other tools and it's language neutral. Not everything is good tbh, when you see the pain it is to deploy an Erlang app in 2020 ...

cutety 6y ago
Regarding portability, I recently came across this project: https://github.com/spawnfest/bakeware https://github.com/spawnfest/bakeware I haven’t gotten around to actually trying it myself, but it advertises that it can compile Elixir projects into a single binary you can copy, paste & run (on Linux & MacOS). It’s not the greatest solution, and the mentioned ~0.5s startup time doesn’t make it great for cli tools when compared to Go/Rust/C. I’m mostly just happy to see there are people out there trying to make Elixir/Erlang easier to use, as much as I love the language, some of the tooling and deployment methods (releases) make me groan.
dnautics 6y ago
is it a pain? mix release Compiles everything, tar/gz's it, sends it to a private s3 bucket. On your server side, you periodically watch the s3 bucket, and when one of your nodes detects a relup, it downloads from the s3 bucket, kills itself. Systemd then restarts it, kicking into the newest version. That's it. This is maybe about 50-100 lines of code, one external library (pick your AWS library of choice), and one systemd script. I think there's even a library for managing systemd from within the BEAM now. If you want to be more sophisticated (a rolling blue-green deploy across an erlang cluster) you could probably do it with transactional locks with the :global module in about an additional 100-ish lines of code, including fully verifying the soundness of newly upgraded nodes using telemetry.