For non-stateful services, it seems very difficult to me to convince people to use Erlang/Elixir over Go. It also seems to me that Go is going to be more maintainable over time than Elixir. Also, Elixir has smaller corporate backing compared to Go.
fwiw, I work at a telecommunications company and I've had no success convincing anybody to use either Go or Erlang/Elixir over Java (& Clojure).
I realize dialyxir exists, but I think a lack of static typing can lead to some maintainability issues over long term. At least this is my experience working on a 6 year old JavaScript codebase.
Do you think language adoption in a company is anything other than "political / culture / habitual"?
But in any case, Go is a very straightforward language if you're already familiar with popular languages like C/C+, C#, Java, or JavaScript. You basically just need to learn the concurrency features (goroutines/csp/select keyword). Elixir is a much larger conceptual leap in that it is functional and the currency toolset is a lot more to grok. Deploying code with Go is also easier than Erlang/Elixir. Static typing is also pretty huge (dialyxir seems more like a bolt on).
> Do you think language adoption in a company is anything other than "political / culture / habitual"?
Sadly you are correct. But what I was getting at is that I'm interested in how do you choose a language. Us the techies should strive to make technical decisions not based on politics, wouldn't you agree?
> But in any case, Go is a very straightforward language if you're already familiar with popular languages like C/C+, C#, Java, or JavaScript.
In every single area of my life I found out that what is cheaper at the start always ends up hugely expensive later. But I am not here to argue life philosophy. Just a quick tidbit.
> Elixir is a much larger conceptual leap in that it is functional
True. I still found the investment very worth it though, even after I spent 14-15 years with OOP / imperative languages before that, mind you. But that's a matter of personal career choice.
> Static typing is also pretty huge (dialyxir seems more like a bolt on).
This is undeniably one of the big weaknesses of Erlang/Elixir (and the BEAM languages in general). It made me try and reach for languages like Go and OCaml.
Go is pretty easy but extremely verbosive. Also the imperative languages' tendency to always show you how you are doing things instead of the what you are doing (namely the way of the functional languages) is something that is poking my eyes out lately, for the better or worse. Additionally, people use Go's typing escape hatch (`interface{}`) way too often, to the point that the typing system feels completely optional.
OCaml I like quite a bit, and its typing system is world-class. Lightning-fast compilation times are a huge productivity boost, one I didn't expect. But lack of even basic parallelism wrappers is pretty off-putting (I am not counting convenient pthreads-like DSL, they are just that and nothing else).
All in all, I'd still go for Elixir for 90% of what I ever do due to its preemptive scheduler and very friendly parallelism and concurrency story. And higher-level tools -- like Broadway -- keep getting added.
The BEAM languages are not a panacea. That's a fact. They seem to fit excellently in the web programming though.
putting aside all the other benefits of a typed language, would you say Elixir's "let it crash" philosophy makes this even slightly less of an issue? Or are they entirely unrelated?
fwiw, I work at a telecommunications company and I've had no success convincing anybody to use either Go or Erlang/Elixir over Java (& Clojure).