Comment by misiek08
17 hours ago
It’s funny how we avoid the technologies we can’t complain about much. Seeing an Elixir projects on production I always wonder „why we are not using it more often”. More talking about Elixir here.
For Elixir I saw a simple distributed job scheduler - it was dead simple in code and was ripped, because it didn’t require maintenance for ~8 years just working without issue and people who knew anything about it left company or switched part of company and acted as they forgot everything.
The other example is medium sized (in terms of features and code) web app - maintained by <30 people now, delivering more than 800 people at the other company, no stress, no issues and with great DX because of the BEAM (other company is drowning in JVM based nano-services).
The way many of us get work assignments is:
- Have to deploy product XYZ (because we don't write everything from scratch)
- Need to extend said product
- Use one of the official SDKs, because we aren't yak shaving for new platforms
Thus that is how we end up using the languages we kind of complain about.
To be fair, languages like Elixir and Gleam do exist, because too many complain about Erlang, which me with my Prolog background see no issues with.
I think the problem is that there is Erlang, the syntax, then Erlang, the features, and then there's OTP. It's a bit much all in one if you might have not done FP before, and then only with C-like syntax languages (e.g. Java).
When I joined an Erlang project I also had some aha moments with the syntax and how stuff is structured, and I found Elixir much nicer to work with (without any real Ruby experience). I don't want to say Erlang is not modern enough, but some things felt like they were around half the work (and more enjoyable) with some Elixir libraries (vastly bigger ecosystem than pure Erlang), for example handling XML.
It might be a bit simplistic, but I don't think you really lose anything meaningful when using Gleam or Elixir over pure Erlang. Just like you don't lose anything when using Clojure or Kotlin over pure Java.