To me, Erlang/Elixir’s power is not necessarily the Actor model implementation, the matching from prolog, immutability, behaviors, etc, but Joes desire to demonstrate you could do more with less.
It is a well thought out and trued system of computation that has a consistency rarely witnessed in other languages, much less the “web”. It is not perfect. But it is pretty impressive.
Unfortunately, I find the appreciation and uptake for what simplicity empowers in the software world pretty under appreciated. Complexity allows people to become specialists, managers to have big teams and lots of meetings, experts to stay experts.
Erlang was being developed in a period where companies were trying to implement software solutions with smaller headcounts, limited horsepower, etc. A multi decade outpouring of cash into the ___domain has made the value of “less will mean more for all of us in good ways” less of an attractor.
And I am grateful for the ends, wish Python had them as well. Python already marks the start of every block with a :, one more keyword and the semantic whitespace madness could end.
Interesting. My very personal opinion is that punctuation like characters should be used to structure/shape code, and words/tokens should be used for expressions.
I accept that others, such as yourself, have different opinions.
I think the reason that I feel the way I do is that I’ve read a lot over the years (like, non fiction), so I’ve been heavily conditioned to look for infix characters to separate and define the shape of code, and strings of words to express things. But that may be self introspective reach too far.
It is a well thought out and trued system of computation that has a consistency rarely witnessed in other languages, much less the “web”. It is not perfect. But it is pretty impressive.
Unfortunately, I find the appreciation and uptake for what simplicity empowers in the software world pretty under appreciated. Complexity allows people to become specialists, managers to have big teams and lots of meetings, experts to stay experts.
Erlang was being developed in a period where companies were trying to implement software solutions with smaller headcounts, limited horsepower, etc. A multi decade outpouring of cash into the ___domain has made the value of “less will mean more for all of us in good ways” less of an attractor.