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Comment by doomspork | Hacker News Reader

Learning Erlang and understanding it is an important skill for any serious Elixir developer. Erlang has been around longer and has a larger set of available tools, it's what Elixir piggybacks on, and we can't just rewrite everything in Elixir.

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I’ve never needed to use erlang in all these years. I have to imagine I’m not alone in finding erlang’s syntax more cryptic, given that erlang hit a limit and elixir broke through to a much wider audience. I don’t know what would make me a more “serious” developer though, having successfully built a few mission critical apps with elixir.

I have built one supervision tree and built GenServers, but I haven’t done much more OTP or cluster and node communications, if that’s what you meant. I’m genuinely curious about what you mean by serious elixir developer.

One great thing from erlang to be aware of is observer:start, or :observer.start in iex, to check out process supervision trees

Well you yourself mentioned being hesitant to add a library that could likely help you solely based on it being in Erlang.

Erlang has many useful libraries, it's been around far longer. If everything has to be wrapped by Elixir to be useful, well that seems like a pretty significant limitation.

I didn’t say it has to be wrapped by elixir to be “useful”, but after having been in debugging hell with an erlang OIDC library a couple years ago, I’ve been burned and won’t touch native erlang libraries unless there’s no other choice.

That’s not a criticism of erlang. That’s a comment on my personal limitations of time.

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