Erlang is such an interesting language.
It's pretty great to feel somewhat familiar with the code examples as a new Elixirist. They don't feel that alien, especially the GenServers!
It's pretty great to feel somewhat familiar with the code examples as a new Elixirist. They don't feel that alien, especially the GenServers!
From my superficial understanding, this would be an ideal use case for Erlang. I guess an Erlang environment would naturally lead to a much more elegant solution.
The problem is, that nobody really speaks it here or has any experience with it. That's why we chickened out and used Go and C++ instead.
I guess a lot of developers have the same problem. Erlang is intriguing, but other languages are the safe choice.
four of us decided to see if erlang would suit us better, and within three months we had learnt enough of the language to set up an mvp that was both outperforming and out-uptiming the python cluster, with significantly less code, and all in basically 10-15% of our time, since we had to do our actual work.
sadly management decided that erlang was too risky to bet on, but my takeaway from that experience is that it is a remarkably easy language to learn/train even junior developers on, and that if your problem fits its sweet spot the language/platform will practically guide you towards a nice clean solution for it, and more than pay for the time taken to learn it in reduced maintenance complexity.
If Erlang is uncomfortable, then use Elixir. Here is an IoT project using Elixir: https://www.nerves-project.org
It builds firmware for Pis and other IoT on top of a thin Buildroot Linux layer, starts the Erlang VM and then that's practically your OS for building your device. Plenty of escape hatches for special needs.
I've done a bunch of streams recently with clustering Pi devices using Nerves, especially fun on local network with mDNS. They are on my blog: https://underjord.io/blog.html
Feel free to reach out if you have questions about Nerves. I'm an enthusiast of it, contributing mostly by using it for fun in public. Also write the newsletter so I'm fairly up to date :)
A lot of devs find Elixir more approachable/familiar than Erlang so it might help in your case there as well.
We are using the first boards from the final batch for this, and I really hope we can start shipping soon.
Basically enterprise IT sometimes mistakes something being easier to finish with it actually being simpler to run long term. Hence people who write themselves into corners with Python websites etc