Whoa, elixir is not even remotely widely used. Again, strong signs on HN-itis.
A few silicon valley corps experiment with it, maybe a couple major players have a service built with it. But in terms of actual mind share in the webdev sphere, it's a tip of the tip of the iceberg.
I already mentioned that beam is cool. I'm not making a point that beam can't be made to do things, only that it isn't suitable for some other things. In the sense of sending bytes from one place to another and having mechanisms for recovering from faults in a network where that communication is happening, erlang is good. But in dealing with complex page requests, structured data from json or webpages or user input or third party apis, it's not a good tool. A modern web developer is thinking about scalability, interopability with tools written in potentially dozens of different languages or variants of js, etc.
Elixir is cashing in on disgruntled shops frustrated with ruby but too incompetent to do scala/f#/clojure or potentially they were misled by uninformed hackers reading too much HN about how wonderful elixir is. They are going to find that while there are benefits to using a telephony system with decades of work out into it, they are inheriting decades of cruft as well. A luxury with ruby was that the past few years practically abandoned all sects of usage other than rails, so while performance was lacking, ergonomics were excellent and developer availability was unmatched even by today's standards where js is ubiquitous. You ever tried to use dialyzer for an app where the source lives on forty different machines? It's not fun. You ever had an actor that just randomly fails every now and then? You hunt and hunt, and in the end, locking it to a certain machine makes it go away and you realize that a machine somewhere else is causing good code to fail... Randomly.
BEAM for the web is a ticking time bomb.
I may seem bitter, but believe me, I'm not. In infosec, developer stupidity pays my bills. I used to think that I could do my job so well that someday stupid devs would all become defensive coders. But I've become a bit jaded, I suppose.
Btw,
There is no such thing as erlang vm. The beam vm is the product, erlang composes otp, which generates beam byte code. At least, not an official one. Maybe there is one somewhere.
> Elixir is cashing in on disgruntled shops frustrated with ruby but too incompetent to do scala/f#/clojure or potentially they were misled by uninformed hackers reading too much HN about how wonderful elixir is.
You’re a very disgruntled engineer and these are very subjective opinions.
If all the software bugs in the world disappeared tonight, I'd be out of a job tomorrow morning but I'd have one hell of a good morning.
The world sucks. I don't choose to hate it anyways, but in order to make good solutions, having a realistic grasp of how extensive the problem is facilitates better, more correct solutions/fixes.
