A metaphor I use that seems to help me cut through some nonsense is that computer systems are factories. From that POV most of what we do in the IT field is un

A metaphor I use that seems to help me cut through some nonsense is that computer systems are factories. From that POV most of what we do in the IT field is unspeakably ridiculous. Our machines are Fractal Rube Goldberg machines made out of Rube Goldberg machines. - - - - Elixir is a bad example, it's "boring" not "exciting". It's a thin syntactic layer over the BEAM, which is for running telephony exchanges. Those things could not be more "boring" in the sense we're using here: they just sit there and work, day in and day out, tolerating faults and load variances, routing phone calls.