[jah]

I feel that Erlang adoption is probably the most realistic growth path for most serious Elixir developers. All of these topics you mentioned (breakers, message routing, etc) have been discussed and developed in the Erlang community for years. The only new thing that Elixir brings to the table in these areas is abstraction and syntax - both of which are arguably not needed in large complex systems.

Source: full-time Erlang developer of 7 years who spent a full year coding Elixir in its v1.0.x days

[59nadir]

Learning how the BEAM works and the architectural decisions that make sense for running your system on it is the realistic growth path for any serious BEAM developer. This has nothing to do with any of the languages on the BEAM, but with what makes sense on the VM.

Your assertion that abstraction is somehow not needed in "large complex systems" (this being completely undefinable, by the way) seems silly and I can refute it with about as many objective reasons as I suspect you have for making that comment. Our current code base would be significantly shorter if we used Elixir (on the order of 50% less code, conservatively approximated) and is an absolute bitch to spelunk in specifically because it's just Erlang.

There is no reason to create a new project in Erlang (instead of Elixir/LFE) outside of reasons like handing it off to clients or the like and the focus should never be on learning Erlang, but on the BEAM. Any knowledge gained through that is trivially used in one of the more productive languages on the BEAM.

[ams6110]

50% less code? Can you provide some more specifics? That seems like a bold claim.

[59nadir]

We use REST for both internal and external calls to services (a mistake, in my opinion) and while Erlang actually has frameworks for this, none of them are good and cowboy_rest requires lots of boilerplate. Doing it with Phoenix would cut out lots of entire modules and replace them with functions without paying any real cost.

I like Erlang, but there's no upside to using it instead of something else that runs on the BEAM, apart from making a basic library that you want to use both from Erlang and Elixir (I don't know what the situation for compiling Elixir with rebar3 is).

Effectively, Erlang is to Elixir what Java is to Kotlin, except there are even less performance differences and no compatibility issues. It makes perfect sense to learn Erlang syntax and learning the semantics of it will mean you've learned BEAM semantics, but you might as well do that in Elixir and actually have a better road to it.

Edit: I'd like to add that I find a general lack of tools for dealing with boilerplate in Erlang. It also has a generally outdated functional programming skew in that it doesn't at all facilitate pipelining and this makes it less attractive to make nice abstractions like Plug(0), for example. This is exacerbated by the fact that collections aren't abstracted over, so whenever you end up dealing with them there's lots of sighing and docs checking to see what the argument order was the week they designed that particular module and that particular function in that particular collection module.

0 - https://github.com/elixir-plug/plug

[amorphid]

I told myself I'd avoid Erlang at all costs. Then I decided I needed to know how leex and yecc work, so I got down and dirty w/ Erlang. It's close enough to Elixir that I can stumble through my way through it.

[ams6110]

Just the reply I was looking for. I do not have your years of Erlang experience but I've done enough to think I have a feel for the language itself as well as the fundamentals of OTP.

I've looked at Elixir and my feeling is that "it's probably great if you're coming from Ruby but what's the point if you're already invested in Erlang?"

Perversely, I actually like Erlang syntax too.

[passer-by-123]

As many others said in the thread, forget about the relationship between Ruby and Elixir, and give Elixir a try. It is much more than syntax: structs, protocols, the test framework, documentation, tooling... even the new error messages and debugger make a big difference on every day development.

There are reasons for picking Erlang over Elixir but if the reason is that "Elixir does not offer anything beyond syntax", it is likely the person has not been paying much attention.

[didibus]

Yup, I actually hate the Elixir syntax. I've never been a fan of ruby syntax. Granted I find the elixir syntax a step up on ruby. Anyways, Elixir is nice because of its abstractions. While I understand most people come to it from ruby for its familiar syntax.