Ten Years of Erlang (ferd.ca)

Article summary

The article reflects on the author's 10-year experience with Erlang, a programming language known for its concurrency and parallelism capabilities. The author discusses the language's hype phase, its killer apps, and the challenges of growing a community around the language. Despite having successful applications, Erlang's community remained small, and the author attributes this to the difficulty of mastering the language's unique concepts and ecosystem. The article also touches on the evolution of Erlang and its relationship with Elixir, a language that compiles to the same virtual machine.

Main themes

• Erlang's hype phase
• concurrency and parallelism
• language ecosystem
• community growth
• Elixir and BEAM
• programming language design

What commenters say

• Elixir's syntax is considered cleaner and more readable than Erlang's, but this is a subjective opinion.
• The performance difference between Elixir and Ruby is significant, with Elixir being faster in many cases.
• Some developers prefer Erlang's syntax and find Elixir's to be less consistent.
• The BEAM virtual machine's performance is a crucial factor in the adoption of Erlang and Elixir, with some arguing that improvements in this area could lead to wider adoption.
• Elixir's macro system and hygienic macros are a major advantage over Erlang, allowing for more expressive and concise code.
• The idea that Elixir fixes Erlang's syntax is overstated, and both languages have their own strengths and weaknesses.
• Tooling and ecosystem support are essential for the growth of a programming language community, and both Erlang and Elixir have made significant progress in this area.