GOTO Conferences
16 HN recommenders · recommended in 17 months, 2019–2024
42:03 · 384K views · May 22, 2019
Sasa Juric explains what makes Erlang and Elixir suited to server-side systems, focusing on the BEAM concurrency model rather than syntax or ecosystem. He demonstrates processes, supervision, and fault tolerance.
It is HN's favorite pitch for Elixir and the BEAM, credited with convincing many people to adopt them.
20 comments from Hacker News
From the author of this post, here's one of the best demos of Elixir, Erlang and modern distributed computing in general: "The Soul of Erlang and Elixir • Saša Jurić • GOTO 2019" - this video When you feel sufficiently amazed by this demo, I also recommend the Elixir in Action book, by this same author, to get started with this incredible ecosystem and paradigm. --- It's hard to imagine a better platform than Erlang's for writing distributed and networked systems of any kind. I fell in love with Elixir in 2016 and have been using it full time since, first adopting as CTO in my previous company, now powering my new solo business. It's such a good language, with great community and stewardship, running on a rock solid platform that's so advanced compared to most popular languages today. Erlang was created 38 years ago, and it's good to see the ideas of Armstrong, Virding and Williams to be vindicated today. They simply were too far ahead of their time.
> explore Go or Elixir I have never seen a good argument for using golang for business logic. If you are writing the actual server then sure, use golang. If you are writing some high-speed network interconnect, use golang. Some crazy caching system, sure use golang. The public WS endpoint, use golang. But if you need to access a DB with golang for anything more than, like, a session token, then you made the wrong choice and you need to go back and re-assess. Elixir is in the "germination phase" and I predict massive adoption in the next 5 years. It is a truly excellent platform, every fintech company I know at least has their toe in the water. Everyone I show this video to [1] just says "well, shit." [1] this video
I replaced a python/uwsgi stateless stack with an elixir stateful system. Flipped it over and it worked flawlessly, and hasn't died once in several months of operation. Latencies are way down, and operation of it is simpler. Full deploy to the head node is one command, not an ansible script. I guess part of it is that I'm lazy and haven't learned supervisor strategies like kubernetes (the place I work doesn't deploy kubernetes anyways) This video is instrumental in giving me the confidence to do what I did: this video
> [and particularly, videos] go out of their way to discuss how process management and IPC communication works After watching a bunch of videos on BEAM/erlang/elixir I came to the conclusion that it isn't a platform for computation, it's a platform for communication. The best video (by far) was The Soul of Erlang and Elixir • Saša Jurić this video Two shallow benchmarks: [LINK] [LINK] (phoenix is at 175)
Almost no business application is written for performance at raw request speed. What Elixir brings is far more the that. Watch this if you want to understand why so many people fall in love with it. this video