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Comment by kiwee | Hacker News Reader

Having worked with Erlang for few years. I still don't understand the new hype behind it. Ok, the Beam VM have a lot of good ideas. But I think that API of OTP and the language itself do not help to make concise and maintainable code. And you're pretty much on your own about tooling. I really think that even if you can achieve good performance/scalability in theory, in practice your team become less productive.

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Was that a long time ago? The tooling has improved massively after Elixir and Hex appeared. The upcoming “Adopting Erlang” book goes into that history a bit:

https://adoptingerlang.org/docs/development/dependencies/

It's really easy to be productive using Lisp-Flavoured Erlang!

http://lfe.io/

I think it's about Elixir. Personally I won't start a web project with Erlang: it's too hard to read and to write, it makes me feel like I'm still in the 80s (it's when I started coding.) Elixir is almost 1:1 with Erlang and I'm much more comfortable with it.

I can't say much about tooling because I never really worked with Erlang, only some toy programs. Elixir's tooling seems to be on par with what I'm using for Ruby, JavaScript and Python.

It's better than those. I can write an integraion test that leaves the vm via http request a comes back in and the http handler only views a shard of the shared state of the system associated with that particular test. That's a concurrent integration test. You can't really do that reliably without the BEAM.

Thanks to Elixirs macros, the code for this subsystem is about 75 lines of code and in order to use it in a group of tests it's a single "use" statement at the head of the test, and the hooks inside of the main part of the code are compiled to no-ops in prod.

> I still don't understand the new hype behind it

Other OTP based languages have different standards for API consistency, developer comfort, and documentation, and generally feel 'more modern' in those respects. That's probably where the hype is coming from.

What tooling are you talking about?

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