Yes! That's what reminded me about this NASA page, it was pretty funny that they used this incorrect GPT5 answer as part of their demo. ofc the main point of the demo was to show that it could generate the animation, but still funny.
Funny indeed. I sent it around to friends saying "not as smart as they think it is" - which happens surprisingly often (Murry Gellman amnesia?): The AI output looks super smart and plausible, but when you actually know the topic, you realize that it's just producing talking points.
The weaknesses they point out pretty much still holds today - gaps in documentation and no critical mass/small community.
The small community size means you have a hard time finding API's for anything but the most mainstream databases/services which is the major drawback with Erlang.
I think it has become a lot better today with Elixir coming into the picture, as the two can communicate pretty much seamlessly and Elixir has been gaining a lot of steam lately, it's improving.
Not to mention that one of the big focuses of the Elixir community has been better documentation too.
That's not to say there isn't a long way left to go though, there is definitely room for improvement still.
Very true. We are adding Elixir team (very happy with it so far), most Ruby shops I know are either looking at Elixir or started using it. Given current rate of grows it looks like it will be very sizable community very soon.
Where is Elixir gaining most of its traction with companies? What types of problems? I've seen the Phoenix web framework mentioned many times, for example:
I'm using it to convert a rails app into a stateful websocket-based service. Honestly I'm barely using the Phoenix framework aside from the channels and potentially presence. (Which isn't a knock on Phoenix, which is awesome, has great documentation for the most part, a very helpful community) I expect I'll make more use of it at some point but if you treat your app as something deeper than basic CRUD this is where the stateful processes of BEAM really come in handy.
In another app that was green-field we're using it to build a highly scalable estimation engine, which is to say, a glorified calculator over a somewhat complex data model.
I agree, I'm using Elixir in a number of production systems and I haven't come across a show-stopper yet, database packages, SOAP, documentation has improved quite a lot, even on Erlang.
I think it's also gotten a lot better since 2008 simply because concurrency has become so much more important. Multi-core chips were only just beginning to get popular at the time this was written, which was really driving a new focus on concurrency, since that was seen as the only way we'd really see speed gains. Because of that focus, Erlang became more relevant, and more popularized.
It's surprising that the BEAM support for operations and management is very rarely mentioned. To me this is the key selling point for using BEAM vs JVM or something else.
Being able to open a remote console and do system introspection/tracing/profiling/debugging is a huge advantage when running in production. And all languages running on top of BEAM ofc get this for free.
In my experience, running JVM in production with tools like JProfiler/VisualVM/jconsole, etc. does not come close to the BEAM when trying to understand what is happening in the system.
> In my experience, running JVM in production with tools like JProfiler/VisualVM/jconsole, etc. does not come close to the BEAM when trying to understand what is happening in the system.
Then you haven't tried Java Flight Recorder/Mission Control or the new javosize. BEAM doesn't come close... :)
I hadn't heard of javosize before, looks interesting, thanks. Being able to update code and data on a live system is very useful and I haven't seen that for the JVM before (BEAM of course handles that :) ).
Well, there are a lot of JVM tools to inject code into a running application. Take a look at Byteman (which is much more mature than javosize, but mostly targets injecting traces for live debugging purposes)
Its basically call employee A and tell him/her. If A rejects the offer to stay then call employee B with the knowledge that B would have got fired if A had accepted.
