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Comment by tsukaisute | Hacker News Reader

If you're thinking of dabbling into Erlang and may be put off by the syntax, try Elixir. Beautiful, actively evolving language with a healthy community. Compiles directly into Erlang bytecode. You can even still call any native Erlang libraries if you happen to need that.

A short review [1] of Elixir from Joe Armstrong, author of Erlang. This is from 2013, and the language has evolved quite a bit since then.

[1] http://joearms.github.io/2013/05/31/a-week-with-elixir.html

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There's also LFE (Lisp Flavoured Erlang) by one of Erlang's co-creators, Robert Virding as an alternative to Erlang or the Ruby-like syntax of Elixir.

  [1]  lfe.io

I don't want this to devolve into a syntax flame war, but I'd encourage people to step outside their comfort zone. I find that the native Erlang syntax helps me to think in Erlang, vs imperative/OO/scripting/whatever.

But yes, better Elixir than yet another reheated Algol.

Oh, I never meant it as a gripe at Erlang's syntax myself. However, there is so much untapped power that the developer community is missing because Erlang is immediately dismissed. People will try node.js, but not Erlang. I'm seeing Elixir as a chance for the Erlang VM to finally get wide-wide adoption it deserves.

Absolutely, agreed on all points.

I really appreciate the work Meiklejohn (disclaimer: former co-worker) is doing to make Erlang more powerful. As I like to say, Erlang gives you better distributed/concurrent primitives than other languages, but they're still primitive.

What people don't get is that Erlang syntax can literally be described in one page. The syntax and the language are very shallow (in the minimalism/simplicity way). When helping someone learn Erlang, most of the questions are around macros/dialyzer annotations, creating a Hello World app, why OTP has things named the way it does ...

It's interesting you say that. I loved the syntax of Erlang at first sight (although the semicolons took some getting used to). Whereas the syntax is the thing I like the least about Elixir - I find it much less elegant.

I, very breifly, dabbled in erlang to try and contribute to a blockchain project that use it. It turned out to be a terrible decision because it's not a language with a large and active community and finding people to contribute to the codebase proved difficult for the project. On the surface, erlang made sense for such a project: mainly due to the concurrency primitives and the OTP framework. I still believe erlang is a bad choice for an open source project that deals in difficult problems and depends on lots of eyes and contributors, such as blockchain development.

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