I think its written for people who already know what the BEAM is. The BEAM is the VM for Erlang or Elixir, similar to how Java has the JVM and C# has .NET essentially.
Nearly every personal blog post submitted here written for people that use a less-mainstream tool/environment/language draws aggressively obtuse comments by people mad that the author didn’t anticipate their lack of knowledge.
There have been math and CS paper submissions where people complained that the papers lacked a complete course on set theory or some CS theory concept the paper relied on. It's a weird thing to do, but apparently popular.
I think it’s an insecurity response— lashing out to distract themselves from feeling needlessly embarrassed for encountering something new or getting confused about something.
I was speaking more generally, but sure, I think the behavior fits. BEAM has a lot more surface area than Apache Beam does here — just do a site search for beam and see how far you have to go to see the Apache project. It’s ridiculous to expect the author of a blog post targeted at people interested in BEAM to disambiguate between them. Additionally, it’s a BEAM conference talk converted to a blog post and it says so right at the beginning of the article with a link to the conference. Thirdly, whoever submitted the link expecting a technical crowd to put in a modicum of effort to figure things out from context is completely reasonable. And how arbitrary is expecting the line to be drawn at your level of need? Shouldn’t project managers be able to read the article without having to look up VM meaning Virtual Machine? Or that functional programming isn’t any programming that uses a function? So yeah, I do not think it’s valid to criticize an author of a blog post aimed at people who already understand the subject for not putting a 1000’ overview at the top.
A criticism asking for one sentence that the author then went and added is pretty well short of lashing out in my book. And by itself is very weak evidence of insecurity. Shrug.
Because of you ask a person who works on Beam about “the Beam book” thats the one they are going to recommend. Who knows that the BEAM book is literally called “the BEAM Book”? There are many books like that, “the SRE book” is actually Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems, etc.
> Who knows that the BEAM book is literally called “the BEAM Book”?
I mean, it's literally a link on a web page. You click the link, it takes you to The BEAM Book's page. This is why the WWW was invented, someone uses hypertext to create a link to something related to a reference. You click on the link, and you learn about what it is.
This keeps web pages from having to all include a full encyclopedia and dictionary and translations in 100 languages in every page. You use the technology of last century to create and integrate into a web of related content, where the links (ideally, but not always) contain additional related and informative content without the need to copy the contents of every page into every other page.
> I mean, it's literally a link on a web page. You click the link, it takes you to The BEAM Book's page.
Now instead of putting the details in the title, you have me reading paragraphs of text and clicking links to figure out what the author is talking about. Did I understand you correctly?
You are coming across as wilful, petulant and ignorant; hence stop digging the hole you are in. Don't argue for argument's sake.
We are not here to makeup for your shortcomings nor spoon-feed you knowledge in various domains.
People share whatever they want and if it is something i don't know anything about, i just do a quick Google search (eg. "what is BEAM in computer science") which immediately tells me what it is (especially the AI overview from Gemini at the beginning). You didn't even do this trivial step but are arguing that people should have anticipated your ignorance and handheld you; not going to happen ever.
Everything on HN can be categorized as one of; 1) Pointers to stuff(useful/useless/junk knowledge) 2) Opinions (clueless/beginner/intermediate/expert) 3) News. That's it; what you do with it is up to you.
