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Comment by giraffe_lady | Hacker News Reader

I think BEAM languages are kind of one of the few exceptions to this argument. Its tradeoffs and runtime semantics really are just very different from other mainstream languages. Other languages & communities are adapting to modern trends towards high concurrency, distributed systems, horizontal scaling, tight fault detection & recovery with varying degrees of struggle and success. Meanwhile in erlang these have been priority concerns for decades and they have highly sophisticated refined solutions to them built directly into the system.

Not that this article makes a good argument for the benefit of any of those things for ML. But at least generally while I am a pretty strong believer of "eh language doesn't really matter" erlang-based languages I do entertain a possible exception for.

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> I think BEAM languages are kind of one of the few exceptions to this argument. Its tradeoffs and runtime semantics really are just very different from other mainstream languages.

Agree wholeheartedly. Elixir/BEAM/Erlang are a league of their own.

Agreed, You might find Handbook of Neuroevolution Through Erlang by Gene Sher interesting.

Never really played with the Erlang VM other than a little more than the Hello World in Elixir, but when I'm in the debugging hell of Apache Spark I really wish it wasn't based on the JVM.

I think debugging in Elixir is easier precisely because of it functional immutable nature. To contrast it, take Ruby (Ruby on Rails) where objects will acquire functionality at runtime. That makes debugging particularly difficult especially if you have jumped into a new codebase with little context.

Java has breakpoints though.

Side effects free is a good thing? Sure. Easier to debug? Cmon, elixir MO is based on, if not copied from, ruby. If anything, elixir is as easy to debug as ruby, if you can claim such a thing (I don't have substantial XP)

> elixir MO is based on, if not copied from, ruby

That's flat out false. Only the syntax is taken from Ruby, that's it. Even the added metaprogramming isn't anything like Ruby's. It otherwise just like Erlang.

Elixir's most popular debugger tool is called pry.

Not really. Elixir tries to use an approach to its "syntax design" that is similar to Ruby. But ruby goes all out in its approach to look like English. Elixir doesn't go that far.

Other than that if you look at how the language works under the surface it is completely different from Ruby which uses Runtime Reflection to add methods to objects in memory.

I was mentioning mostly debugging XP. And even if my comment applies to other facets of elixir, it does not describe it as a whole. That being said, I don't find it easier to debug than ruby, IME.

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