There is serious work on making a statically typed Erlang so there is hope. If you are into static typing 
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Is this what Facebook is working on, or someone else is on it?
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I got very excited when I’ve seen a Facebook employee’s announcement on this very forum that they are working on statically typed Erlang – but judging by the fact that they were last known to hire for that team still, and the amount of time it takes for these things to take shape, I wouldn’t hold my breath.
For all the love I have for Erlang and Elixir, I fear its far future lies only in being a compilation target (e.g. Rust compiling to Core Erlang). Still love Elixir a lot!
Yes, I was referring to what facebook is working on. And they are coming along quite nicely.
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Would the BEAM be a good target for Rust? It is very very Erlang specific and if rust can be implemented efficiently on the BEAM then it is basically another form of Erlang.
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Very likely not. It would take the form of a reduced subset of the language (akin to how there are Rust libraries that consciously avoid using the standard library so they are portable to embedded targets). Which would introduce confusion.
Mostly thinking out loud. I wonder how several separate such efforts can be united – Lumen, Facebook’s work on a statically typed Erlang, Rust’s async capabilities… Probably never going to happen though.
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This thread is such an informative thread and I feel obliged to share my perspective. Disclaimer: I don’t write in elixir for a living.
I am attracted to elixir precisely because it is not mainstream (yet). Why would anyone learn to program differently if it is not to put food on the table? The only reason I can think of is for fun. Lisp was fun, Smalltalk was fun, because you don’t need to read inches thick books and write boring boilerplate code before you can do anything meaningful. Now that Lisp and Smalltalk are too simple to tackle problems of modern days I have to move up the ladder. I’ve searched long and wide and only this year I found Elixir. In terms of complexity it is the next level up for me, but more importantly, it is still fun.
If we cannot convince the corporate to adopt elixir from the top down, try to do it from bottom up. When java/C#/node.js developers come back home and work on their pet elixir projects and feel so much blissful compared to the dread of their day job, we are winning.
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That’s what I did, several times. People were just like “ehhh, no, please don’t change our tech stack” and I went ahead and ignored them and showed them that Elixir brings real, immediate, noticeable business value (we’re not even talking about developer quality of life).
I have zero moral problems with such a behaviour from my side. If you’re too rigid and set in your ways, I’ll go out of my way to do the job that I was hired for – and maybe educate you in the process.
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Folks, this thread has been running for too long and it is probably a bit intimidating for people to join given the messages count.
Most recent discussions deserve to be their own thread and I believe we will have more participation if they are done as so, so I will go ahead and close this discussion in order to promote the new topics.
Thanks everyone for contributing to the discussion!
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I think you are wrong about Lisp and Smalltalk are too simple to tackle the problems of modern days. While they may be perceived as being too simple their simplicity actual hides extreme power which allows them to tackle anything and often better than modern more complex languages.
Getting the simplicity right is the hard and difficult part but once that is done there are no limits to what complex systems you can build on top of them.
A Dijkstra quote I love which is oh so true:
“Simplicity is a great virtue but it requires hard work to achieve it and education to appreciate it. And to make matters worse: complexity sells better.”
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