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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

#31

Post by greenavocado »

ambicapter wrote: post #3

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

Elixir has a lot of promise on the surface but today I'm going to tell you why I am going to pivot my ten person company away from Elixir to a different language for two of our main customer facing services: typing and staffing. Elixir's typing situation is simply insufficient for complex real world use cases on teams with many developers and disparate services.

Elixir developers are also almost non-existent in the United States. It is far more productive and far less risky from a business perspective to hire someone that knows Python for the backend and is forced to work with mypy and pydanic using a major web framework.

The trope that functional programming leads to better code and is more maintainable is also a lie. Defect rate is just as high if not higher per module because of the typing problems.

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

#32

Post by hosh »

greenavocado wrote: post #31
ambicapter wrote: post #3

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

Elixir has a lot of promise on the surface but today I'm going to tell you why I am going to pivot my ten person company away from Elixir to a different language for two of our main customer facing services: typing and staffing. Elixir's typing situation is simply insufficient for complex real world use cases on teams with many developers and disparate services. Elixir developers are also almost non-existent in the U…

What typing does Python have available?

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

#33

Post by belval »

hosh wrote: post #30
ambicapter wrote: post #3

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

> how come it hasn’t taken over the world all this time? I don’t know why it has not. However, it has such a strong set of advantages that people who know what it can do for them keep describing it as a “secret weapon”. As others have mentioned, it will scale up on a single machine to make use of all the cores (unlike Nodejs, Python, or Ruby). It can already scale horizontally by clustering. Because of the way it is…

> it will scale up on a single machine to make use of all the cores (unlike Nodejs, Python, or Ruby)

Python definitely does "use all cores" on a machine with the multiprocessing package, not sure what you mean?

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

#34

Post by greenavocado »

hosh wrote: post #32
greenavocado wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elixir has a lot of promise on the surface but today I'm going to tell you why I am going to pivot my ten person company away from Elixir to a different language for two of our main customer facing services: typing and staffing. Elixir's typing situation is simply insufficient for complex real world use cases on teams with many developers and disparate services. Elixir developers are also almost non-existent in the U…

What typing does Python have available?

Enforcing use of mypy is good enough for all real world use cases

https://mypy.readthedocs.io/en/stable/index.html

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

#35

Post by aeturnum »

cmdrk wrote: post #8
ambicapter wrote: post #3

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.

There's a pretty consistent stream of relatively senior postings on the elixir forums[1] as well as a number of successful large-scale elixir deploys (Discord, Heroku, etc) that probably do their own recruiting. I get the sense that YCombinator's technical mentorship focuses on language silos they have experience in, so this community is probably just a bit outside the "sweet spot" for BEAM hiring.

Hiring juniors (and getting work AS a junior I imagine) is a challenge. I don't think Elixir is that hard to learn (and has fewer foot-guns than many competitors), but it makes evaluation more difficult.

[1] https://elixirforum.com/c/work/elixir-jobs/16

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

#36

Post by hansonkd »

ambicapter wrote: post #3

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

TBH part of the BEAM runtime is actually pretty slow. is the problem.

    * Want something flexible and easy and don't care about performance? Use Python
    * Care about performance? Use Rust, etc.
Just because it is distributed cloud native doesn't mean for single requests or functions it is fast.

Almost all SaaS applications are request based and do not need P2P or real time communication. BEAM is worse here. If a company does need that they can specialize that part of their application.

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

#37

Post by greenavocado »

ramy_d wrote: post #22
ambicapter wrote: post #3

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

I think WhatsApp is still using Erlang and they are biggest messaging app in the world. Discord is using Elixir but it's more niche. I think if you look at use cases where they excel, you will find them there.

Discord uses Rust (and Elixir) https://discord.com/blog/how-discord-stores-trillions-of-mes...

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

#38

Post by davidw »

ToJans wrote: post #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…

What do you use instead, out of curiosity?

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

#39

Post by TechDebtDevin »

davidw wrote: post #38
ToJans wrote: post #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…

What do you use instead, out of curiosity?

Read dude

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

#40

Post by conradfr »

greenavocado wrote: post #37
ramy_d wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think WhatsApp is still using Erlang and they are biggest messaging app in the world. Discord is using Elixir but it's more niche. I think if you look at use cases where they excel, you will find them there.

Discord uses Rust (and Elixir) https://discord.com/blog/how-discord-stores-trillions-of-mes...

They use both.
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