To the programmers who worked with Erlang and related languages (so targeting the Erlang VM): how was your experience?
I’m interested in the Erlang ecosystem but would like to know if its languages are hard or can be considered powerful modern languages (and possible easy, but not “Python easy”, I want to write efficient software with statically typed syntax).
Also, how mature is the ecosystem? Are there good frameworks to write scalable webservices with? Did you have fun using them and the language or was it more a headache-inducing experience?
So all in all what did you experience, in which context did you; and would you recommend learning an Erlang related language?
I used Elixir for a project in 2024, though I was not the lead on the backend part, so my exposure was limited. Still got a nice taste of it, and have to say I was positively impressed.
The Erlang VM is kind of amazing in the capabilities that it offers, and integrating with external languages was also easier than I thought it would be (we had a Rust core that we needed to link in).
As for Elixir specifically: the language is nice, but its Achilles heel is definitely that it’s dynamically typed. For this reason I would suggest having a look at GLEAM, even though I have no personal experience with that and don’t know how mature it is.