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by vvpan 768 days ago
I do not write Elixir/Erlang programmers. But I do think that the actor model and BEAM solve a few issues that I face when writing complex backends, which I do.

For example I have not found a language whose error handling I like - Go and Rust are super meticulous, for example and you get error handling code everywhere, which is good for stability but not great for developer experience. TS/JS/Node suffers from the opposite - error handling is an afterthought and you never know what exception will come at you and from where and bomb you whole server, so you end up relying on cloud solutions running large redundant arrays of processes. Isolation of errors within a process and message passing is a great abstraction.

Another thing is that I get to spend a lot of time on is setting up Redis/Cloud stuff to do basic queue, caching and cron. That stuff takes up time, increases complexity, creates new sources of error and grows institutional knowledge. Using a system which has those built into the language is a major improvement. Vercel/Deno/Bun/etc are solving some of the above by including them in their cloud offerings with relatively good DX, but it still increases complexity, takes you out of code and locks you in with the vendors.