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Comment by fdr | Hacker News Reader

I've considered at various points (but not with deep seriousness I admit), typescript, julia, scala, swift. You might notice all of these have a REPL in common. Elixir might be a reasonable alternative, but not one I exercised here. In areas I wanted to take risk, I had some other stuff going on.

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uh just fyi: Elixir's repl is the most powerful of all of them, as it gives you incredible introspection. With care you can attach a repl to a remote running program (in prod, if you take appropriate precautions) and be able to diagnose the running state of your program quite effectively -- like you can examine the tail call state of any given process.

> With care you can attach a repl to a remote running program

That's good, but it's also table stakes. Drb (in the standard library) lets you remote access any Ruby object, so if you want a remote REPL, it's is simply a case of injecting a Drb server. Hence e.g. pry-remote which remotes the Pry REPL, but you can also then remote any already existing object in any running application.

I mean the equivalent is also possible out of the box Erlang VM. Without having to install sidecar servers or monkey patching objects with potentially spooky action at a distance.

Erlang, from day 1, was designed to be logged in to remotely. No other system is remotely close to the sophistication that Erlang (and as a result elixir) has in this regard

There are no "sidecar servers" or monkey patching or "potentially spooky action at a distance" involved in what I described.

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