Ask HN: What do you dislike about Erlang? - crypto-jeronimo
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PaulHoule
My main interest these days is writing non-blocking GUIs. I don't want to see
a "spinning beach ball" or "no results found" or similar things _ever_.

In theory Erlang has the best non-blocking support of any language, but I see
a lot of risk in developing prototypes to get to the point where I know it was
a good decision.

I don't see Elixir as moving the needle so far as what is conceptually tricky
about Erlang.

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sideshowmel
No one uses it. The average programmer writes Javascript/Java/Python code.
Erlang is a great functional language, and I've actually seen it used in the
real world, but it goes above the heads of most programmers.

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jefflombardjr
Do you think Elixir will help grow the community?

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SpecificAnswer
i think elixir is a good effort but given the decline of ruby and elixir's
similar syntax, that hasn't done it any favors in terms of adoption.

i'd be really excited for a python inspired implementation.

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amsha
It’s dynamically-typed and it doesn’t have real arrays. It can sometimes be
frustratingly slow to do things that imperative languages do easily, but
that’s the price of entry for functional languages. Luckily you can drop down
into Rust or C if you need high performance.

Otherwise, it’s a great language. I’m consistently happy with the decisions
that the Erlang and Elixir core teams make, and it’s my go-to language for web
development.

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eb0la
High learning curve. First two weeks might fry your brain.

Language is perfect for what was created: matching pathologicaly ordered
number arrays (phone numbers); but needs some way to get people onboard fast.

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dpeck
I’ve written a lot of Erlang/Elixir, basing the stack for my last startup on
it. I wouldn’t change that decision, but you are completely right on people
not getting it. I _way_ overestimated the capacity for even well educated devs
with computer science degrees to pick it up.

There were other factors, but largely it came down to whether they were
exposed to something like scheme before the typical java education. Outside of
that it was only people who had a deep understanding of the actor model that
could get it.

