Erlang's VM is great, Erlang the language isn't imo. Elixir just did it better imo and this person seemingly can't stand that people seem to like it more. Let people like the things they like :P I'm really not sure this needed a blog post.
Edit: That said I'm not being contrarian for the sake of it, I tried both Erlang and Elixir. Elixir however, is the one that kept me because I knew I wanted the benefits of that VM and the OTP capabilities to a degree but the niceties of a modern language which is after all a major reason I choose a language to do a job and be easy to write and maintain which I feel Erlang lacks the latter.
The post does read more like venting than a structured critique, but a few of his points are still valid.
Every time I hear someone praising Elixir, it's never about some Elixir-specific feature but usually about something that Erlang has provided for ages like pattern matching, lightweight processes, supervisors, the preemptive scheduler. Given this, I'm sure you can appreciate how bittersweet this can be for an Erlang developer.
To me Elixir is just a more complex, verbose and less elegant version of Erlang so it kinda frustrates me when newcomers would rather learn Elixir than plain Erlang.
You do understand this is just your subjective opinion and not a universal truth, right?
You are basing your argument as if it was a fact that Elixir is “cleaner” (whatever that means) and that there was a thing called “software-testing-revolution” which Erlang was never a part of. Both are subjective and, frankly, plain BS.
> if you are truly dedicated to the craft of software you probably should want them to learn Elixir
Oh boy, I don’t even know where to start... so you’re basically implying that Erlang programmers are not “truly dedicated to the craft of software”? It would be laughable if it wasn’t just sad.
This is the Ruby world mentality that just rubs me the wrong way. Not even worth carrying on with the discussion.
Does that include writing blog posts? Or, liking Erlang over Elixir? Or, bashing Elixir?
How do any of those stop people from liking what they like? Unlike, what you did.
I'm not really sure this needed a hypocritical comment.
i wish i could still write erlang but i've moved on to languages with much better implementations (go, rust, julia)
Why not?
In Elixir you have consistent utf-8 binary string usage everywhere, consistently named modules/functions, consistently ordered arguments/return values, and, thanks to the pipe operator, in 3rd party code as well.
And none of that in erlang ;)
Much better documentation support, better compile time infrastructure, smart metaprogramming (this package would be a PITA in erlang: https://github.com/ityonemo/zigler), opinionated but optional directory organization. Module namespaces which are trivially subdivided and aliased, easier time making anonymous GenServers. The Task module, full stop. The registry module, as well.