HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

Elixir creator here. This is a very good question and a very hard one to answer because there are so many facets to consider. I will provide some bullets instead of doing direct comparisons.

* Concurrency is not an after thought. The primary abstraction are actors (Erlang processes) that are isolated and communicate with message passing. Data structures are also immutable which helps greatly with concurrency and also leads to clearer code (it is really comforting to know that a value won't change under your feet).

* The Erlang VM: we are leveraging 30 years of knowledge in building and running fault-tolerant systems, thanks to the underlying process model. We could really go deep into this topic so I will just link to an article I wrote some time ago talking about Elixir and microservices: http://blog.plataformatec.com.br/2015/06/elixir-in-times-of-...

* Performance may also be a big deal depending on what you are doing. Elixir/Erlang are not good at number crunching but if you are running anything behind TCP/UDP, it will give you better throughput and a consistent latency compared to Ruby, Python, Node.JS, etc.

* We don't have compile time checking but we do provide type specifications and a way to check them: http://elixir-lang.org/docs/master/elixir/Kernel.Typespec.ht.... The integration between Elixir and Dialyzer is suboptimal today but if type checking is a big deal for you, it will certainly help.

TL;DR: Elixir is for building and running fault-tolerant, concurrent, distributed systems. It brings extensibility and great tooling to the Erlang VM. If what you are building requires 1. a TCP/UDP port and/or 2. running for a long time, you should definitely consider Elixir. An introduction to the language can be seen here: https://vimeo.com/131631884

⬐ eatonphil

Thanks for taking the time to reply here, Jose. Elixir is definitely a very impressive language and as a former PL student, I am definitely a huge fan of your work.

That said, if I were looking into a BEAM language in the future - and after this thread I am inspired to try again - I would probably be more inclined to go with Erlang. For the same reason that Java is probably an easier sell than Scala.

However, I am most likely not your target audience. I am neither an existing Erlang user nor a Ruby user (nor even a Node user).

⬐ ellyagg

I think Clojure is finding it pretty easy to sell its advantages over Java...