[lliamander]

A fair question.

I don't know of many instances where scripting and concurrency would be needed in the same application. But if you wanted to use single language both for scripting tasks and applications that require concurrency, then Raku or Elixir would work.

One instance I can actually think of, that would be specific to Erlang/Elixir, is if you have a long running service that you sometimes run batch jobs against (like importing data from a CSV). An Elixir script can hook directly into an Elixir/Erlang service and interact with it using message passing. It's a heck of a lot simpler than RMI, and avoids the need to expose new HTTP endpoints specifically for such tasks.

[weff_]

Is that like the relationship between C# and PowerShell?

[lliamander]

I think so, at least in some ways. I've shipped a project using PowerShell to script Windows Server/Hyper-V, and it was a pretty pleasant experience. Having a scripting language that not only does typical scripting stuff (wrangling text, etc.) and understands your application's objects is excellent.

Some differences:

* You can actually write your whole application in Elixir, whereas I could not see doing that with PowerShell

* In Erlang/Elixir, instead of objects you have processes. Think of your application as a microservice architecture on steroids, using the Erlang RPC protocol as a means for inter-process communication.

Because each process just sends and receives messages, your script can just send messages to any of the processes that make up your application, as if they were your own service. All you have to do is connect to the remote application using the Erlang Distribution Protocol (to connect different runtimes over the network).

[weff_]

I heard so much about the actor model, I should really try it in its intended glory one day.

[lliamander]

It's a trip, and it took me a little while to wrap my head around. However, I now much prefer it to working with other concurrency abstractions (such as callbacks).