It’s funny how we avoid the technologies we can’t complain about much. Seeing an Elixir projects on production I always wonder „why we are not using it more often”. More talking about Elixir here.
For Elixir I saw a simple distributed job scheduler - it was dead simple in code and was ripped, because it didn’t require maintenance for ~8 years just working without issue and people who knew anything about it left company or switched part of company and acted as they forgot everything.
The other example is medium sized (in terms of features and code) web app - maintained by <30 people now, delivering more than 800 people at the other company, no stress, no issues and with great DX because of the BEAM (other company is drowning in JVM based nano-services).
I think the problem is that there is Erlang, the syntax, then Erlang, the features, and then there's OTP. It's a bit much all in one if you might have not done FP before, and then only with C-like syntax languages (e.g. Java).
When I joined an Erlang project I also had some aha moments with the syntax and how stuff is structured, and I found Elixir much nicer to work with (without any real Ruby experience). I don't want to say Erlang is not modern enough, but some things felt like they were around half the work (and more enjoyable) with some Elixir libraries (vastly bigger ecosystem than pure Erlang), for example handling XML.
It might be a bit simplistic, but I don't think you really lose anything meaningful when using Gleam or Elixir over pure Erlang. Just like you don't lose anything when using Clojure or Kotlin over pure Java.
Just out of curiosity, because I saw way too many i++ implementations - were things like UUIDv7 allowed or because of timestamp they are not random enough?
While having such conversations I assume it’s already good enough, but maybe I’ll learn something here!
UUIDv7 wasn’t as ubiquitous at the time so it did not come up.
Here’s how I would think about it: do I want users to depend on the ordering of UUIDv7? Now I’m tied to that implementation and probably have to start worrying about clock skew.
If it’s not a feature you want to support, don’t expose it. Otherwise you’re on the hook for it. If you do explicitly want to provide time ordering as a feature, then UUIDv7 is a great choice and preferable to rolling your own format.
For me the biggest issue is all the articles and videos showing how people run entire companies in WASM and then sample code with fn(i32, i32) i32.
The interoperability between languages and pre-defined APIs like WASI are just not there yet and its just rough to use.
Of course crazy things can be (were already!) done with WASM, but it's more like Rust in the beginning and is still advertised as Go ;)
If you are not interested in disrupting the grid then yes - you implied it’s bad. You only mentioned the bad sides of such info being widely available.
And like already mentioned in more nested comments - it’s not difficult to get such info if you are determined enough.
I stated a fact - it really happened and it was so communicated that the left-of-centre organisation obtained their information online, your assumption that I'm "implying it's bad" is in your head.
Not so sure these days tbh.
People are trying to shove as much shiny tools as possible instead of sometimes writing 10 vanilla JS lines and proceed to next feature or project.
Maybe it’s already exhausted, but left-pad, is-odd, is-even are still my examples for people.
Maybe it is „very” professional, so he is part of one of hundreds of teams and he is creating micro parts of big system and with such setup he is easily hiding in ocean of very low performing people.
In many big setups there are so-called microservices that in reality are picoservices doing function of 1-2 method and 1-2 tables in db.
Either way - the setup looks nice and is one of very few that really shows how to make things work. A lot of people say about 5-10x improvements not showing even the prompts, because probably they made some 2 model CRUD that probably can be already made with 20 lines of code in Django.
From my perspective: tons of very simple, duplicated software. The bad thing is - there is a lot of space on different markets for such software. Here in Poland you can earn for pretty decent life being lame programmer, but building simple automations for small companies.
I was raised in a way I still don’t have courage to switch to such approach, but doing this for 3-4 such entities I can see how you can make living from that.
With LLMs you can automate 90+% of the job if not more.
Today Microsoft didn’t write any OS and had only partial participation in programming language or framework. They open sourced .NET and in Windows 10 you can still see same behavior and internal as XP.
I wonder how many real top-tier engineers are there at Microsoft and how hard they have to work to prevent it from failing. It’s not uncommon in any bigger than probably 200 people company - the belief of having a lot of talents while having maybe 1% of the company capable of doing anything working.
Roomba couldn’t remember map, so when you wanted to clean part of the apartment you had to build barriers or just walk with it. It also got lost way too many times.
As for the Chinese products - look at Valetudo. If you write about cloud and privacy considerations then you are already aware enough to just flash it and you have local, cloud-free, GREAT product.
For Elixir I saw a simple distributed job scheduler - it was dead simple in code and was ripped, because it didn’t require maintenance for ~8 years just working without issue and people who knew anything about it left company or switched part of company and acted as they forgot everything.
The other example is medium sized (in terms of features and code) web app - maintained by <30 people now, delivering more than 800 people at the other company, no stress, no issues and with great DX because of the BEAM (other company is drowning in JVM based nano-services).
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