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Comment by spinningslate | Hacker News Reader

Indeed. OTOH, "focus your main code on the happy path, and put your error handling in the supervisor tree" is unfortunately a bit less pithy.

Shades of "boring technology"[0] which might better be described as "choose technology that is a good fit for the problem, proven, reliable and proportionate. Spend your innovation tokens sparingly and wisely".

[0]: https://boringtechnology.club/

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I'm personally caught between my attachment to the "boring technology" philosophy and my desire to try Elixir, which seems like exactly the kind of obscure and exotic technology that it rejects.

Erlang is old, reliable tech that used to scare people once upon a very distant time for

- running on a VM (now boringly normal)

- using a pure-functional language with immutable terms (the pure-functional language fad has since then come and gone and this is now archaic and passé if anything)

But languages only get stereotyped once. At any rate, it's pretty boring and old.

I actually think elixir is the perfect boring technology now. The language is matured, and is not changing much. There will be a big addition at some point with the new type system, but other than that the language is pretty much done. Underneath elixir is erlang, which is extremely mature and highly boring in the good way. Live view might be the only exception, but even that is now becoming boring as it has gotten stable. If you are a believer in boring, you should definitely give elixir a try

Already said by two sibling comments in all the detail I would have, but I wanted third it: as a subscriber to boring technology myself and actually never been one to jump on new shiny tech, Elixir/Erlang is the epitome of "boring technology." Elixir does a lot on its own you can often cut out the need for a lot of other dependencies.

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