Twenty Years of Open Source Erlang: A Retrospective from the trenches

I used Erlang before Elixir and it was awesome, albeit with a syntax that required getting used too. I&#x27;ve often looked at bridging the gap between Ruby and Erlang, and closely watched and tested solutions like Reia [0], Erlectricity [1] and Ernie [2].<p>I was delighted when Jose started getting involved in the space and released Elixir. Thanks Jose!<p>[0] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;reia-lang.org" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;reia-lang.org</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gilesbowkett.blogspot.com&#x2F;2007&#x2F;05&#x2F;erlectricity-erlang-ruby-bridge.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gilesbowkett.blogspot.com&#x2F;2007&#x2F;05&#x2F;erlectricity-erlan...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mojombo&#x2F;ernie" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mojombo&#x2F;ernie</a>

The article is underselling Erlang&#x27;s meteoric success. &quot;Adoption was slow during the first few years.&quot; - After 5 years there was an international conference devoted to Erlang, a global community around it and the language enjoyed commercial success from the beginning.<p>It just goes to show that Erlang fills a real niche that is ill served by most other programming languages. Programming distributed systems remains painful in 2018 - not because there aren&#x27;t any theoretical solutions to make it easier, but because there are astonishingly few <i>practical</i> systems that offer built-in support. Erlang is such a practical system and if you didn&#x27;t already look into the language it is well worth your time to pick it up. :)

What an amazing language. I am working on a Elixir project, with a lot of Erlang peaces used directly. Integration is flawless and beautiful to observe. I do have many languages in my toolbox but only few of them were truly exciting for me, Haskell six or so years ago and Elixir&#x2F;Erlang&#x2F;OTP this year.

I had never watched Erlang the Movie before, this is truly a gem:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=uKfKtXYLG78" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=uKfKtXYLG78</a><p>This is a great way to explain the benefits of Erlang. Anyone who has tried to write robust, distributed systems should immediately see the benefits. Even all of these years later.

I&#x27;ve been engineering software for almost 30 years and no languages have ever been more enjoyable for me to work with than Erlang and now Elixir. I&#x27;d like to thank the teams behind both languages for making my career interesting again.<p>Specifically, I love working with pattern matching, OTP, and the functional nature of both languages. Thanks Erlang (and Elixir) guys!

Not specifically Erlang but I have used Elixir and it was one of the rare languages that blew my mind when it comes to new ways of thinking when implementing things.<p>How not to love some of these features!<p><pre><code> [first, second | remaining_of_people] = list_of_people greeting = fn %{name: name} -&gt; &quot;Hello, #{name}!&quot; %{} -&gt; &quot;Hello, Anonymous Stranger!&quot; end</code></pre>

Full time Elixir dev here. This was a very neat walk down memory lane. Thanks for sharing! Since Elixir is so new, and I wasn&#x27;t that aware of Erlang prior to it, it&#x27;s sometimes easy to forget just how long Erlang has been around!

I didn&#x27;t hear about Erlang as much as I did since Elixir came out and showed me the power of the VM and its ecosystem. As a ruby developer it&#x27;s easy to pick up Elixir and I&#x27;m learning so much more about functional programming and systems than I did ever before.

I really like Erlang and Elixir, but I&#x27;m really worried when I see a tech stack that is still trying to figure out deployment and runtime configuration of systems.<p>I&#x27;m not trying to be inflammatory here. As per many resources such as &quot;Phoenix in Action&quot; deployment is still a major culprit. And Dockyard themselves (one of the major Elixir shops, where McCord works actually) have a full time guy on the payroll to try to solve the problem of runtime configuration.<p>It just sucks, because these are 2 major concerns of any production-ready stack.

Fantastic tutorial: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;learnyousomeerlang.com&#x2F;book" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;learnyousomeerlang.com&#x2F;book</a>

Kudos to Francesco and the guys at Erlang Solutions for their outstanding work in the open source high concurrency field!

My limited understanding of erlang&#x2F;elixir is that it helps easily run actor model programs (fail-safe loosely defined as something with retries built-in) in a grid of long-running interconnected instances. With more and more focus on &quot;serverless&quot; development that I am being exposed to, I am curious to know if it is a good fit in this space. Say if you are constrained to use AWS serverless solutions - sqs, sns, dynamodb, lambda, cognito, api-gateway ... etc, with event-sourcing (for event-drivenness) with retries (automatic&#x2F;configurable), (why) would using erlang&#x2F;elixir vs say nodejs&#x2F;typescript&#x2F;go&#x2F;haskell&#x2F;java be a good choice (let&#x27;s assume you equally love these languages for the sake of not getting in to &#x27;but X is better than lang Y&#x27;)?

Erlang truly is something. It&#x27;s amazing how much effort is expended trying to achieve even a semblance of its functionality in other languages&#x2F;ecosystems.

I forget where I read that there were estimated to be only about 1K professional Erlang coders in the world. That seems absurdly low. Does anyone believe this is actually true?

had to smile at the nod to adrian mole :)