Comment by haspok | Hacker News Reader

Comment by haspok | Hacker News Reader

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Don't forget ZIO (and other Cats Effect based libraries) which is the new kid on the block, and has it's own take on fibers and concurrent programming.

The biggest problem with Erlang is that hardly anything out there needs this level of concurrency and robustness in a single system - in the new world of microservices and serverless architectures there are other ways to cope with scaling. This is the main selling point, and unfortunately in all other areas Erlang is significantly outdated and refuses to evolve - even less so than the Java language which is a dinosaur in itself.

Having said that I think Erlang is a fantastic teaching tool and should be on everyone's bucket list of "things to learn in this life as a software engineer".

> The biggest problem with Erlang is that hardly anything out there needs this level of concurrency and robustness in a single system - in the new world of microservices and serverless architectures there are other ways to cope with scaling.

I wondered about this myself before I started using Elixir. In practice, it turns out when it's cheap to make things concurrent more services take advantage of this feature.

Tests and the elixir compiler are extremely fast because of this, and it makes the whole development experience better.

Because the primitives are so simple, people experiment more which makes better software. Nobody would come up with phoenix live view for Play framework in their spare time because play framework is so overly complicated.

Yes, that's a problem, you can't be the only one responsible for a core part of the stack.

I did an interview at a major streaming company and one critical part was written in Erlang. It has been working great but the guy who wrote it had left for some time and nobody knew Erlang there, so they would have to rewrite it if an update was needed.

Or, someone could take a week to learn Erlang and make whatever change is needed. You won't be an Erlang expert in a week, but it's a pretty small language, so editing existing code isn't that hard. And that existing code can't be that bad, since it's still working.

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