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What I mean when I say that machine learning in Elixir is production-ready

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Re: What I mean when I say that machine learning in Elixir is production-ready

#2
I'm a big fan of Erlang, Elixir, OTP and the BEAM vm. However, I only have very lightweight server needs for my SaaS, so it just doesn't make sense to switch to it, especially as my code is mostly client-based/typescript.

If my core value prop would be around real-time messaging or streaming data, BEAM/OTP would be my first choice.

Slightly OT: I'm still in dubio about Cloudflare pages, but I'm sure that the platform for the backend reboot that we're starting will be in Typescript. There's so much advantage in having one language for everything.

Re: What I mean when I say that machine learning in Elixir is production-ready

#4

I see so much breathless adoration for Erlang and Elixir, how come it hasn't taken over the world in all this time?

Because when you try to throw junior developers at it who had OO concepts in Python, Java, or C# drilled into them in college, switching to Elixir/Erlang feels like learning Martian. I had the fun experience of it being the second language I used in my career after PHP, and it definitely took strong mentorship and smart seniors who were really into Elixir for me to get up to speed.

At least when we used Elixir about eight years ago, we had to also learn Erlang as many libraries running on the BEAM VM that Elixir and Erlang share were only written in Erlang. So that made my brain melt further.

Once I got into the flow, I really liked it, and am glad I got the opportunity to learn it as a junior developer, but I've largely dropped it as there aren't many jobs in my area looking for Elixir.

Re: What I mean when I say that machine learning in Elixir is production-ready

#7

I see so much breathless adoration for Erlang and Elixir, how come it hasn't taken over the world in all this time?

Inertia: curly braces rule the world. Imperative/OO programming are ubiquitous, FP not so much.

Corporate sponsorship: even with curly braces and mutability, Go probably wouldn't have gained its mindshare without Google.

Performance: It's getting much better, but the BEAM was never designed for maximum performance. People don't like slow platforms, despite the other advantages.

Scale: much like one of the databases written in Erlang, Riak, you typically don't need a BEAM language until your solution is large enough that you've already written it in something else.

I love Erlang, but I'm a lost cause.

Re: What I mean when I say that machine learning in Elixir is production-ready

#8

I see so much breathless adoration for Erlang and Elixir, how come it hasn't taken over the world in all this time?

take a look at the Who's Hiring threads - despite the love the BEAM gets on this website, it seems very few folks are brave enough (or public enough) to hire Erlang/Elixir/Gleam/etc engineers. I've seen one or two Elixir jobs each posting and zero Erlang jobs in the last 6 months or so of Ctrl-F'ing the posts as I see them.

Re: What I mean when I say that machine learning in Elixir is production-ready

#9

I see so much breathless adoration for Erlang and Elixir, how come it hasn't taken over the world in all this time?

Because embarrassing little in coding is controlled by these imagineers. There’s no much real difference in programming languages anymore, honestly I’ve never met a good programmer that cared about these, it makes your code fringe and inportable.

Re: What I mean when I say that machine learning in Elixir is production-ready

#10
post #9

I see so much breathless adoration for Erlang and Elixir, how come it hasn't taken over the world in all this time?

Because embarrassing little in coding is controlled by these imagineers. There’s no much real difference in programming languages anymore, honestly I’ve never met a good programmer that cared about these, it makes your code fringe and inportable.

Maybe the programmers you hang around with don't work on large scale message streaming? It's pretty niche
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