Erlang/Elixir
Hacker ApprovedShares rank 87 of 163 programming languages by recommenders
Recommended for fault tolerance, safe concurrency and hot code swapping on the BEAM VM. Critics note that multi-host clustering is hard to get right.
Recommended for fault tolerance, safe concurrency and hot code swapping on the BEAM VM. Critics note that multi-host clustering is hard to get right.
14 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 13
- criticize it
- 1
- approval share
- 93%
Recommended in 7 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: not recommended
- January 2026: not recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: not recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: not recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: not recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it carries the badge
- 13 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 13 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 7 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Fault tolerance and graceful crashes
“fault-tolerant languages such as Erlang/Elixir allow me to not worry about the billions of edge-cases”
Comment from 26 May 2026 in “Use Boring Languages with LLMs” “letting things crash gracefully is so useful”
Comment from 19 Nov 2025 in “Cloudflare outage on November 18, 2025 post mortem” “has a resilient environment with hot swapping”
Comment from 3 Aug 2026 in “AI migrated legacy COBOL programs to Java, bugs included” Safe, scalable concurrency
“Erlang/Elixir will probably become more relevant as people move into massively parallel constraint solvers.”
Comment from 23 Aug 2026 in “A Friendly Introduction to Racket” “Safe language, safe concurrency, immutable, scalable”
Comment from 12 Aug 2026 in “Why Go Is an Ideal Language for AI-Assisted Software Engineering” Actor model fits problem spaces
“the actor model implemented on top of a stable core (eg. Erlang/Elixir on BEAM) might be a natural fit”
Comment from 16 Feb 2026 in “Ideas for an Agent-Oriented Programming Language” “Erlang's computing vision lends itself super well to this problem space.”
Comment from 25 Feb 2026 in “Pi – a minimal terminal coding harness”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Multi-host clustering is immature
“much like Erlang/Elixir the multi-host parallelization is not cleanly implemented... yet...”
Comment from 17 Apr 2026 in “30 Years of HPC: many hardware advances, little adoption of new languages” “Clustering on OTP was certainly an area even seasoned gray beards tried to avoid.”
Comment from 4 Sep 2026 in “How an MIT research project became the Julia programming language”
Other programming languages people recommend
The four most recommended other programming languages, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
See all 163 programming languages, rankedWhat people said
All 15 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“it is at least a local optimum in languages/VMs”
“Clustering on OTP was certainly an area even seasoned gray beards tried to avoid.”
“Erlang/Elixir will probably become more relevant as people move into massively parallel constraint solvers.”
“Safe language, safe concurrency, immutable, scalable”
“has a resilient environment with hot swapping”
“Erlang/Elixir where you can pattern match against the raw bytes specifying sizes, endianess, etc”
“fault-tolerant languages such as Erlang/Elixir allow me to not worry about the billions of edge-cases”
“much like Erlang/Elixir the multi-host parallelization is not cleanly implemented... yet...”
“Erlang/Elixir is a not-terrible benchmark for how things should work in that state”
“Erlang's computing vision lends itself super well to this problem space.”
“the actor model implemented on top of a stable core (eg. Erlang/Elixir on BEAM) might be a natural fit”
“Haskell, Erlang/Elixir, and Rust would save you from most of these problems.”
“letting things crash gracefully is so useful”
“this is not true (and dig deeper into Erlang/Elixir)”
“The solution to the event problem is to double down and make your event loop more generally usable.”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.