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Comment by giancarlostoro | Hacker News Reader

Interesting! I posted Erjang (JVM based Erlang VM)[0] a few days ago, I guess I missed this one. I have a fascination with both Erlang and Lisp. I love Erlang because it is definitely a back-end language. I also love it's resiliency. I like how expressive Lisp languages can be. So maybe we'll just run Clojerl on top of Erjang, which is on the JVM, and Clojerl is based on a JVM language, talk about an onion.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20174830

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Putting an Erlang-like language on the JVM would really lose all the advantages of Erlang, wouldn't it. The syntax, while very useful, isn't the real strength of the language. It's the BEAM.

It looks like this is actually running the real Erlang/OTP, just with some amount of performance penalty from not being on the BEAM. This could be fantastic for fans of BEAM languages who now have a low-profile way to introduce, say, an Elixir proof of concept into a JVM-dominated infrastructure.

Would it really matter though, whether the underlying VM is JVM or BEAM, if people don't want to code in Erlang or Elixir?

I don't think introducing the BEAM is the hard part, I think it's all about the language barrier.

In my experience the opposite is true.

I've been able to introduce the BEAM in a large company (where I work) but the barrier has been they don't know it, they know very well the JVM and they don't care about the language if it can produce a runnable jar.

I would really use the JVM more if I could program it in Elixir.

Personally I spent most of my learning curve on the BEAM facilities rather than Elixir itself. Elixir as a language is simple and fairly imperative, it's quick to pick up.

Using the language for data transformations and such is a breeze but learning the concurrency primitives, message passing, OTP tooling and behaviors is where the real work is in my opinion, when building distributed systems on top of BEAM.

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