Hacker News Reader

Comment by josefrichter | Hacker News Reader

Funny how these things are fairly simple on BEAM. Funny how majority of industry won’t ever learn anything about BEAM and will keep hitting walls for the rest of their careers.

View on HN

Without evaluating the merits of your statement, I find it funny you start out implying others are close-minded, but end up rather close-minded yourself.

Considering how many other solutions that are all trying to solve distributed systems issues but avoiding just using Erlang or Elixir I think the statement has merit.

Exactly, I've commented many times on here that at least half the show hn posts (like Hatchet from yesterday) are just overlycomplex implementations of features that have existed on the beam for decades. Or at least already in the Erlang/Elixir ecosystem (Oban, for example).

Proof that the only thing that matters about any software is whether it's easy for beginners to get into. What's wrong with Erlang that in ten years it's seen so little adoption?

10 years? You mean 38 years. And Elixir (a language on top of Erlang) has had solid adoption and is very easy for beginners.

https://joyofelixir.com/

The majority of the industry is made of people who care mostly about their own careers. If solving nasty distributed system problems is simple, you can't justify having a huge bloated expensive team. If your team doesn't spend a lot of money, you aren't seen as very important within the company. Since people want to be important, it's hard to get more productive languages to be adopted.

It's way too slow and per-task overhead is much higher than in compiled alternatives (Rust and .NET - BEAM performance is much worse than these, sometimes by a factor of 10).

Surely you're not asserting that other platforms that provide concurrency and parallelism primitives are designed by people who don't know what they're doing?

What can BEAM do that other languages can't? Do you have a favorite learning resource for it?

Here's the meme https://www.reddit.com/r/elixir/comments/gpdlp4/the_more_i_l...

It's not so much that it does things others can't, it's that it does all the things, running in the same application space, and things like background jobs, or a caching layer, or cron are all things that most stacks these days need to sort via another library, and Erlang/Elixir apps just do it all on BEAM.

Check out this presentation :)

"The Soul of Erlang and Elixir by Sasa Juric"

Really one of the best presentations to show what you may get out of adopting Elixir.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvBT4XBdoUE

I find the pedagogy of Erlang and Elixir to be sparse. Maybe those programmers just start out strong and don’t need soft on-ramps. I know they’re working on it but not having types is also a big deal for project scalability and not just performance scalability.

What is BEAM?

BEAM is the VM that Erlang, which Elixir (which this project uses) runs on:

- https://www.erlang-solutions.com/blog/erlangs-virtual-machin...

- https://www.erlang.org/blog/a-brief-beam-primer/

Unfortunately the Elixir app seems more flaky and keeps disconnecting with even a small number of users compared to the 1m checkboxes guy.

tbh, the 2m app is more clunky than the OG 1m. Virtual scroll is very poor. Jump doesn't seem to work (it works just sometimes).

Any recommended learning resources?

get your feet wet with elixir or gleam. i think they are way more approachable than erlang

There is currently a HumbleBundle running with a bunch of Elixir books from PragProg. I won't share the link as I don't want to spam.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com