Elixir also opens you up to the entire erlang and Beam ecosystems. Not as common as Java, I know, but still decades of knowledge and tooling around it cutting across many industries.
Seems like Beam is a more specialized tool than JVM but if you need that sort of functionality it's phenomenal. With things like built-in performant persistent key value stores and cluster management I'm kind of surprised more people haven't pushed through the "this is useful but lacks broad adoption" barrier.
Well… yes and no. A lot of things built in are pretty spartan and not always appropriate (Mnesia …cough…).
This said it’s the only environment I’m aware of that is built around the idea of cluster, not just a local process that may do some rpc to other processes.
You can find libraries for many things but they are not the same quality and breadth as the big Java ones.
Seemingly reliable for a specific type of problem, though. Most reliable software doesn't require a distributed network to be reliable, and I don't think binary execution on BEAM is any more inherently reliable than the JVM, right?
The BEAM is designed for a software architecture approach called OTP in the Erlang community -- it is designed around trees of process supervision. So there is an entire robust framework for reliability really built in as a primary concern for the BEAM.
If you need high concurrency, heavy traffic, real-time system with high resilience, there’s probably nothing out there that comes even close to BEAM. It is definitely possible to write such a system in Java or Rust, but most likely at huge cost for something that you can get out of the box elsewhere. BEAM has narrower scope, but in that scope it’s probably far ahead of anything else.
I tend think the opposite. Developing for Android I found the Java build process and maintaining a solid development environment a headache. If that follows on to Clojure I can see why it wouldn’t be as popular even if the language itself is overall better.
My experience would make me agree with you. Developer experience around tooling in Clojure makes a lot of assumption around prior knowledge of Java ecosystem.
Elixir, on the other hand, welcomes the newcomer better.
Except using Java ecosystem as-is would not be idiomatic in Clojure, which means you need an ecosystem of wrapper libraries. I recall someone making similar argument on some other post, on how it adds more space for bugs, performance issues, and still making it hard to work with. The context was in comparison to Kotlin, where using Java ecosystem is much nicer experience.
