[sergiotapia]

Here's to another 10 years of Erlang/Elixir. The programming stack for the boring software developer that wants to clock out at 5 sharp. It's fantastic I tell ya. I have been blessed with opportunities to work with Elixir fulltime and it's hands down the best experience I've had. Compared to C#, Rails, Nodejs, it's miles ahead. (Although C# with dotnet is coming up fast and _crazy_ compared to what it was 9 years ago).

This ladder is a great blueprint, great article:

    functional programming
    isolated processes and concurrency
    reliable concurrency (links, monitors, timeouts)
    OTP behaviours and other system abstractions
    How to structure OTP systems
    How to build releases and handle their life cycle
    How to never take the system down, and how to operate it

[saberience]

I think you should add to this comment "in my opinion."

Because in my opinion C# is miles ahead of Erlang. If I want to create an application, back-end, front-end, running on a wide variety of platforms, Mac, Linux, PC, IOS, etc, I would use C# 1000 times over versus Erlang.

The tools available, documentation, huge amount of libraries and support mean that developer efficiency in C# land is light-years ahead of Erlang. I could make a website + backend + IOS/Android app with all shared code while using tons of pre-existing OSS frameworks / packages and get it all up and running and prod/enterprise ready in no time at all and have it ready for enterprise load and scalability. Try that with Erlang!

[njharman]

> create an application, back-end, front-end, running on a wide variety of platforms, Mac, Linux, PC, IOS, etc,

You might not believe it, but that is a fairly niche desire. There a tons of use cases for server software running only on server OSes (which these days, is some flavor unix 90+% of use cases)

And gee, Erlang is/was made to excel at server based software. Not desktop frontends.

My point C# can do 10 things. Erlang can do 1. If all you care about is the 1, then the other 9 C# can do are moot. If Erlang does that 1 better, then it is best (for that use case). C# is best for others.

[verttii]

Wouldn't this logic make Java by far the greatest language ever invented?

[askl56]

That's not already self evident?

[danielscrubs]

I don't disagree except "enterprise load and scalability" which is pretty much Erlangs bread and butter.

[sambal]

Is there a shared code story with native iOS and android apps written in objc/swift & java/kotlin?

[PasserBy2020]

Comparing Erlang to C# is a bit unfair. The latter is a general purpose language that can be used to build software on every layer of every platform. The former is a distributed programming DSL (an awesome one granted). There is 0 Erlang-native GUI libraries, there is no documented Erlang pipeline for iOS apps etc.

[bitwalker]

> The former is a distributed programming DSL (an awesome one granted)

I mean, that's a completely incorrect characterization of Erlang, regardless of how you feel about the comparison to C#.

Erlang is just as much a general purpose language as C#, it is just a different paradigm, i.e. functional programming rather than (mostly) object-oriented.

> There is 0 Erlang-native GUI libraries

This isn't true at all. There is a tight integration with the wxWidgets framework (in fact, one of Erlang's handiest tools is built with it, Observer). Scenic, as mentioned elsewhere in the comments, is for Elixir (perhaps there is an Erlang-native API for it, not sure), but provides a native framework for OpenGL, and a UI paradigm that meshes nicely with processes and supervision.

Of course, Erlang is not perfectly suited for all environments (e.g. iOS apps), but that is true of essentially all general purpose languages - there are some places where they aren't well suited or have flaky support. I wouldn't build an iOS app in C# either, it makes little sense to use anything other than Swift/Obj-C in that environment. Likewise if I'm primarily building Windows-based apps, I would use C# before I would reach for Erlang. But for backend services, infrastructure, networking, etc., it is extremely well suited, and I think the domains that it can provide a compelling solution for will continue to grow (e.g. embedded).

[toast0]

> There is 0 Erlang-native GUI libraries

Have you seen ex11? [1], it's Erlang native, and at least 0.1 of a GUI library. X11 and Erlang actually go together really well, although a lot of important functionality for a real application is missing; I used this to display images generated by an Erlang application, and it felt a lot nicer to me than using wxWidgets; I added a few bits of functionality to the library while I was in there, and it wasn't that hard to turn the X11 protocol docs into Erlang code for the things I needed.

I imagine if someone had a real need here, it wouldn't be that hard to get it into shape. Caveat: X11 is dying, etc.

[1] The most active fork appears to be here https://github.com/skvamme/ex11 -- it's been somewhat retargeted to mobile, but the examples for desktop should still work as well as they did.