[mstromb]

As someone familiar (and generally quite happy with) reactive programming, what does Erlang/Elixir do that makes it a more general, better solution? And to what types of problems, specifically?

I think the reason that I picked up Rx is that it was a natural extension of LINQ, both literally and figuratively. What made Rx really click for me was thinking of it in terms of IEnumerable that explicitly acknowledged of the time domain. Since then I've come to understand some of the concepts that underlay both of them (monads, mostly), but I wouldn't have made the leap to Rx if it wasn't so easy to get there from existing knowledge. I haven't encountered anything where the next step would be "learn Erlang." You can make the argument that we should all learn about things that are unfamiliar, but there are lot of things that are unfamiliar and I haven't seen a lot of reasons why Erlang should rise to the top.

[pron]

There is a confusion of terms here. Rx is reactive programming (aka dataflow). What this article talks about -- isn't (and indeed is better served by Erlang or other similar solutions).

[TuringTest]

I followed the Coursera course linked from the article and the similar "Programming Paradigms" course from Standford[1], and from what I recall, dataflow and actors where formally equivalent - i.e. you could write any one using the primitives of the other.

Dataflows can be implemented through message calls to independent actors, but I also saw a stateful actor implemented as a purely functional dataflow in the shape of a sequence of its successive states.

I've seen recently a lot of people from both styles saying "but that's not really what 'reactive' is" at the other, and I think it may be a misunderstanding caused by that equivalence.

[1] https://www.edx.org/course/paradigms-computer-programming-lo...