Erlang Ecosystem Foundation Blog

Author here! The article was published earlier this week and I have a quick addendum: regarding Erlang/Elixir, my goal has always been to bring new developers to the platform. After all, Erlang developers already have the most important part of Elixir, which is the Erlang runtime! There are also key people in both communities working hard to make sure the tooling is consistent across all languages. A lot of this effort happens under the Erlang Ecosystem Foundation (https://erlef.org/) too. All to say, regardless if you pick Erlang or Elixir (or Gleam, LFE, etc.), I hope you will fall in love with the platform as much as I did 10 years ago!

As the creator of Phoenix, I've never written an Erlang program fwiw. That said, I frequent the Erlang docs and most seasoned Elixir developers will do the same because the standard library is a wealth of features, and the documentation while not 2022 polished, remains a remarkable resource. > I don't know what a solution is, but perhaps a concerted effort to create a documentation and library ecosystem that never links back to Erlang would help. And where there are critical systems that use an Erlang library, perhaps rebuilding it in Elixir is in order? This would not be helpful. Erlang has over three decades of features, heritage, and libraries. Elixir helped usher in first class documentation as a core language feature, but that doesn't make rock solid Erlang libraries somehow things that should be avoided. Rewriting for rewriting sake is also not a good idea. One of the benefits of bootstrapping off an already amazing platform is exactly because you don't have to invent the universe. See Clojure and Java. In fact, Elixir has helped Erlang up its documentation game, and there is already work done to help the ecosystems share documentation tools. Both ecosystems work by rising together, not masking one or the other. We see this in tools like `telemetry`, documentation generators, and recently the Erlang Ecosystem Foundation: https://erlef.org

That's why I said the syntax is largely done. They're still actively working on tooling as this release shows. The compiler has some useful improvements. IMHO, a stable syntax leaves more focus on improving the tooling as in this release. It seems to work well for Clojure as well. That pretty well sums up why I rather like Clojure and Rust but not Elixir: tooling is an afterthought, at best, with Elixir. Luckily, bitwalker's work has largely been integrated into Elixir in v1.9. That's disappointing to hear. Distillery was a cobbled together mess of bash (not even POSIX!) scripts that should've been put out to pasture ages ago. Elixir has three major problems from my POV: developer tooling is an afterthought, portability is an afterthought, and build artifacts / deployments are unwieldy. Distillery embodies all three and it's a shame that the path forward is simply to throw more bodies at a broken solution. Recently the Erlang Ecosystem Foundation [EEF](https://erlef.org) was founded and supported by a several companies and the community to ensure the Erlang (including Elixir) ecosystem is maintained. Unfortunately the status quo is not great – rather than doubling down on poorly thought out solutions it would be nice to see actual improvement. I spent enough time dissecting distillery in an attempt to get deployments to work to make my eyes bleed. Contrast that with rust where the developer experience is front and center. Even as the syntax evolves over time it…

I don't have a direct answer for you, but the Erlang Ecosystem Foundation seems like a good place to start. https://erlef.org/

This is purely conjecture on my part, but a beginner-friendly web framework was a barrier for adoption for Erlang, and I'm really excited to see Nova continue to grow. If the moving background of the Nova website is so distracting that you can't bare to explore the rest of the framework, here are some other links to explore: - HexDocs: https://hexdocs.pm/nova/quick-start.html - Github: https://github.com/novaframework/nova - Erlang Forums: https://erlangforums.com/c/erlang-frameworks/nova-forum/65 - Erlang Slack: https://erlef.org/slack-invite/erlanger Long story short, get involved with Erlang (and Elixir)! They're both awesome, can't recommend them enough.

The Elixir / Erlang community: https://erlef.org/

> Yeah and that leaves huge chunks like tooling that aren't done or mature. That's why I said the syntax is largely done. They're still actively working on tooling as this release shows. The compiler has some useful improvements. IMHO, a stable syntax leaves more focus on improving the tooling as in this release. It seems to work well for Clojure as well. > When I walked away from Elixir and Phoenix it was right around when bitwalker abandoned distillery leaving the deployment story unsupported. Blech. Too bad to hear. Luckily, bitwalker's work has largely been integrated into Elixir in v1.9. So now it will be supported going forward by the core team which makes more sense than one developer supporting a core part of Elixir's tooling. Recently the Erlang Ecosystem Foundation [EEF](https://erlef.org) was founded and supported by a several companies and the community to ensure the Erlang (including Elixir) ecosystem is maintained.

For folks interested in the Security aspects of Erlang/BEAM languages the guidelines from Security Working Group of the Erlang Ecosystem Foundation are a good resource - https://security.erlef.org/ and https://erlef.org/wg/security

You welcome. Afaik it has been a long-time bet done by José Valim (former Rubyist & author of e.g. Devise) and others, this is not something that is going away anytime. Each library has been building on top of the previous libraries & abstractions (including transpiling Elixir instructions into GPU code, see "defn" etc). Since you mention Erlang, there is even a Machine Learning Working Group at https://erlef.org/wg/machine-learning. The most iconic & advertised case I'm aware of is the work done at Amplified https://www.amplified.ai ; this has been the topic of a Keynote at ElixirConf EU this year, which you can find at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FlZHkc4Mq4. I am also starting to use ML + Elixir in production and I'm aware of other individuals doing so. I do not have a registry of companies doing so, but we're seeing more and more experienced ML practitioners mentioning they are coming from Python and willing to try something different (e.g. https://elixirforum.com/t/data-science-and-machine-learning-workflows-… and other posts on Elixir Forum). Hope this helps!