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Comment by jack9 | Hacker News Reader

What do you mean by bias here? Some languages are practical, some more/less efficient. The BEAM was BAD in 2005. The language is ugly and this has hindered adoption in a myriad of applicable areas for decades. Elixir was a wrapper for people who already knew Erlang. Languages don't live in a vacuum, they are for people and organizations (where decisions are made about non-existent people) to use. Erlang could be done without being so horribly ugly and with more syntactic specificity (give atoms an identifying symbol). You have to consider the pareto distribution when thinking about design, not just how intelligent some programmers naturally are.

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Elixir was a wrapper for people who already knew Erlang

Elixir was a wrapper for people who already knew Ruby.

Which is why most Elixir users come to it from the Ruby/Rails community.

It was created by Jose Valim, a Rubyist and Rails committer, who was looking to improve Ruby/Rails concurrency story [0]:

Back in 2010, I was working on improving Rails performance when working with multi-core systems, as our machines and production systems are shipping with more and more cores. However, the whole experience was quite frustrating as Ruby does not provide the proper tool for solving concurrency problems. That’s when I started to look at other technologies and I eventually fell in love with the Erlang Virtual Machine.

I started using Erlang more and more and, with experience, I noticed that I was missing some constructs available in many other languages, including functional ones. That’s when I decided to create Elixir, as an attempt to bring different constructs and excellent tooling on top of the Erlang VM.

[0] https://www.sitepoint.com/an-interview-with-elixir-creator-j...

Jack, my comment was not against Erlang or Elixir, but SOME of these comments here.

People start comparing different languages in different areas and use cases and instead of discussing about the main subject, keep saying oh no my language is more popular or that language is written in C so C is the best...

Really? I'm writing Elixir just fine coming from Ruby...

I can use it just fine too. It's not unusable, it's a barrier. The defense of arbitrary syntax as no-consequence is misguided and ultimately irresponsible (in a lazy sense).

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