| > This isn't specific to Elixir/Phoenix/Beam > Like any well-designed system that separates concerns. Again, this isn't language or framwork-specific. While it is true you can implement those systems in pretty much any turing complete language, we expect some languages and frameworks to make it simpler to write certain kinds of systems. For example, doing scientific calculations in Python or Julia is much easier than in Ruby. It it not impossible to do in Ruby but that's just how things are today. Since Erlang was designed for handling millions of connections in a fault-tolerant and scalable fashion, we expect it to shine in the areas previous listed. > citing resilience, efficiency, scalability, and handling traffic spikes seems thin -- these are all things that can easily be attained with just about any well-factored system on any number of languages/frameworks. Easily attainable? Err... no? Depending on which system you want to build, it is hard on all languages and Erlang (or Akka or whatever) is going to make it quantitatively less harder. If your reference point is classical web applications that depend on the database, you still have a single point of failure (even when using primary and replicas). You could use primary-primary replication but that is still a world of pain and definitely not easy. Maybe that's fine for the applications you are building but that does not even scratch the requirements of building distributed systems at scale (and your app server talking to the database is a distributed system). But we don't even need to go that far to see the benefits of Erlang, Elixir, Clojure, Go, etc. The fact those languages enable developers to use all of their machine resources efficiently should be enough reason for moving on. Rails developers complain about slow boot times, slow test suites, while using only 25% percent of their machine resources (1 of 4 cores, for example). The languages mentioned above have abstractions that make developers more productive and yet they refuse to adapt. We saw this happening with the adoption of garbage collectors and it is only a matter of time for us to take concurrency for granted as we do with memory management. |