> If LLMs turn out to be a fad and you’re reading this after they jump the shark, please accept this article as a historical artifact from a time when we entertained the idea that fancy autocomplete might eat the world.
> Aside, for those who don’t know what Elixir is: it’s the best general purpose language in the world and if you haven’t heard of it wake up and smell the bacon.
I find a certain humor in this, as elixir is more likely to be a fad than LLM's. I like and use elixir, but their lightweight processes are too restrictive for a lot of use cases. It's great for scaling web apps, however, and I think it's worth recommending over nodejs or other javascript based backends for a lot of people.
> I find a certain humor in this, as elixir is more likely to be a fad than LLM's. I like and use elixir, but their lightweight processes are too restrictive for a lot of use cases
I'm not an Elixir user, but you're criticizing Erlang/OTP, which has been around way too long to be considered a "fad".
I guess I mean "beam for everything" is a fad. It has a place, and is exceptional at some things, but it's relatively specialized
Elixir/Erlang is best for building long-running systems that you don't want to go down. Erlang's creators optimized for stability (phone systems) and sort of reinvented concurrency and distribution in support of that goal. There are some great talks by Joe Armstrong about this on YouTube, highly recommend!
For CPU-bound tasks and number crunching you can always just write it in Rust (or C or Zig) and NIF out to it from Elixir.
As a dev who builds apps that are served over the internet, it covers everything I need. Maybe that's a specialty niche.
> I guess I mean "beam for everything" is a fad.
There is no such fad. The vast majority of seasoned BEAMists will tell you that it is not for everything. There are enthusiasts bringing some surprising stuff to it which is great as it mostly falls into the category of "useful for things users are already outsourcing to other languages." But there is a whole host of things it will just never be able to do and no is pretending that it will.