Erlang/OTP

“Where Erlang, to stick to your question, can be non-deterministic (without taking special care).”

“they also had a historically bad performance story due to misjudgments in development direction”

“When you send a message in Erlang, nothing the recipient does with the message impacts anything on the sender side. That's good!”

“If you really know you can't scale with just a big box from the outset use something like Elixir or Erlang”

“the guarantees offered by OTP and its actor model are much more important than compile-time type checking”

“the Erlang platform gives you so many guarantees that even if you somehow make a mistake, it is never catastrophic”

“copying everything which, while improving memory safety by a huge margin, introduced (a) various GC footguns”

“Thousands of share-nothing actors (fibers / green-threads) with first-class support for communication between them”

“Erlang somewhat fixes this with 'selective receive' which re-introduces the possibility of deadlocks.”

“Python already had threads - and had the examples of Go and Erlang to show how well then worked compared to async / await.”

“Any sufficiently complicated concurrent program in another language contains an ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Erlang.”

“it does feel like it could be a natural fit for its own operating system without having to live on top of Linux”

“Erlang would offer similar benefits, because what we're doing with these things is more message passing than processing.”

“Erlang does make some failure modes less nasty. It also hides latency debt well enough that people thinks the model saved them”

“I'd still rather be writing this system in erlang than in another language, where the footguns are bigger.”

“A GenServer processes messages sequentially from its mailbox — mutual exclusion is the execution model”

“Erlang is a concurrent language at the core; everything else is just a poor imitation implemented in libraries.”

“It's the converse that's an issue. If your org doesn't use any Erlang. You're not going to be able to add it.”

“the fact you can just attach a console to a running system and inspect processes' states makes it much easier to debug”

“The language has extremely robust recovery mechanisms, having been designed for flaky telecommunications infrastructure.”

“if you want to learn distributed systems stuff, two Erlang BEAM processes on virtually any general purpose computer are more than enough”

“I think the problem is that there is Erlang, the syntax, then Erlang, the features, and then there's OTP.”

“Erlang's VM is actually surprisingly slow, and in the era of c10k it was still using select/poll”

“A small cluster running erlang is probably better than a tiny number of finely tuned race-car boxen.”

“In terms of ops usability, it's difficult to beat reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS) features of mainframes. Erlang/OTP comes close.”

“maintainability which I've found to be excellent for anything I ever did in Erlang, probably better than any other language I've used”

“If you're looking for a language that makes "sharing by communicating" the default for almost every kind of use case, that's Erlang.”

“I was so annoyed when I found out the OTP library and realized we've been reinventing things for 20+ years”

“Erlang's said to be a pretty bad fit for -say- 3D video games that require high raw performance.”

“doing powerful things in Erlang/Elixir is trivial where it would be really convoluted in other languages”

“It's too easy to hot-patch a live system during firefighting and then forget to retrofit the fix to the source repo.”

“I have found the real value of Erlang to be internally between trusted nodes of my own physical infrastructure”

“Most of it fits into the 'as simple as possible' mold, although there's some places where the use case is complex and it shows in the code”

“Erlang therefore misses the "benefits" of operating on a higher ISO layer, but gains powerful advantages of operating on layer 4”

“They just added shit to it as they needed it without apparently putting too much consideration into the organization, naming, or conventions.”

“you are going to find it hard to get to the same level of feature completeness that Erlang offers out of the box”

“Two separate Erlang nodes. On different machines, different networks, different continents if I wanted.”

“a niche purely functional language with a weird-ass syntax that is challenging to transition to”

“Erlang is very math-notation-y and when I introduced people to some Erlang code I'd written they understood it”

“The point of Erlang/Elixir is that it is as performant as possible, and Erlang's history is a testament to this.”