> It's like they are building tech for made up in corporate conference room use cases.

Totally felt the same during the live-translation demo, when these two casual business folks were talking about "the client will love the new strategy". Dystopian corporate gibberish.

The lack of authentic examples diminishes the impressive tech. Great design is all about function. Why is it so hard to show how this would actually be used in the real world?

I've been writing Elixir on-and-off since 2017 for personal projects and since 2024 professionally, at a big tech company.

The two experiences couldn't be more different. While I loved the great development speed for my personal projects, where I am writing more code than reading it, joining an existing project needs the opposite, reading more code than writing it. And I can only repeat what many people say, dynamic typing makes this so much more difficult. For most code changes, I am not 100% certain which code paths are affected without digging a lot through the code base. I've introduced bugs which would have been caught with static typing.

So in my conclusion, I'm bullish on gleam, but also on other (static) languages embracing the cooperative green-thread/actor model of concurrency like Kotlin (with JVM's virtual threads). (On another note, I personally also dislike Phoenix LiveView and the general tendency of focusing on ambiguous concepts like Phoenix Context's and other Domain Driven Design stuff)

I worked a year or so at an Elixir shop, and this mirrors my experience. I had to navigate to call sites to understand what I was being passed and type hints were not sufficient. Dynamic typing fails larger orgs/teams/codebases.

Fun to develop and solo administer. Small teams with a well known codebase can do amazing things. I work at orgs with multiple teams and new hires who don't know the codebase yet.

For me, the sweet spot is Go.

Out of curiosity, at the tech company, did the team use typespecs and dialyzer?

The lack of type hint for function parameters is definitely a productivity killer (in my case).

There are type hints for function parameters. With some care and guards, Dialyzer can be somewhat helpful.

What actually drove me nuts was absence of guards and meaningful static analysis on return values. Even in my small but nontrivial personal codebase I had to debug mysterious data mismatches after every refactor. I ended up with a monad-like value checking before abandoning Elixir for my compiler.

Fully agree with this based on similar experiences. IME most devs hired without previous Elixir/Phoenix experience don’t end up liking the tech stack very much, even though they become productive quite quickly and don’t struggle too much with Elixir. A lot of Elixir/Phoenix fans make the mistake of thinking that everyone is going to love it as much as they do once they get up to speed.

Isn't there some kind of optional typing in Elixir?

What you're describing are the same uncertainties I've used to have writing PHP a long time ago, but since using optional types and PHPStan checker, it kind of serves as a compiler pass that raises those issues. The benefit being that I still can be lazy and not type out a program when I prototype the problem on my first pass.

>Isn't there some kind of optional typing in Elixir?

It’s in the works and recent versions of the compiler already catch some type errors at compile time, but it’s nothing remotely close to what you get from Typescript, or from any statically typed language like Go, Rust, Java, etc.

> Isn't there some kind of optional typing in Elixir?

Sort-of. Developers provide typespec which is like a hint and use dialyzer to find issues before runtime.

This is why Gleam exists.

Also, Gleam fully supports Elixir packages.

I am now super curious which big tech company is betting on Elixir?

Nubank, Latin America's most valuable bank, relies heavily on Elixir and even acquired Plataformatec, the company where Elixir was created.

A blog post by them about this: https://building.nubank.com/tech-perspectives-behind-nubanks...

Wasn't Nubank the Clojure posterchild not long ago?

Are they moving from Clojure to Elixir, or adding it?

The referenced post is from 2020, and nubank still posts clojure content and sponsors the big clojure conference, so I’d be shocked if they were dropping clojure.

Their tech stack is probably enormous, it wouldn’t surprise me if they’re using both for different things

Also the referenced post is about them acquiring plataformatec, not about using elixir. Jose Valim (the creator of elixir) left plataformatec after the nubank acquisition in order to continue developing elixir, I've never heard of nubank using elixir, afaik they're solidly a clojure shop with no plans on changing.

it's just an internal I/O-bound project, where BEAM concurrency makes lots of sense. Grown from an engineer's side project as it was useful and working well, not a company-wide effort to bet on Elixir

Having worked as Cloud Solution Architect at Microsoft Germany/Azure, let me tell you:

Nope this gap can not be closed by any US company alone due to the Us Patriot Act - which forces any US company (including e.g. a German subsidiary) to allow access to all data for national security purposes.

Having worked at AWS, no, it's a separate partition under a separate legal entity, and the EU framework is specifically designed to counter Patriot Act, CLOUD Act and the like. It's gonna be similar to AWS China, and potentially more restrictive in some senses. That leaving aside regions we're not allowed to talk about.

> Having worked at AWS

This should be disclaimer at your first message when you compared AWS with UPCloud.

TBH, I would not trust AWS with countering the Patriot Act.

> This should be disclaimer at your first message when you compared AWS with UPCloud.

Fair, my bad. Still obviously misleading.

1. DB instances "starting at $144", I have a $63 in my basket at the moment, and also Aurora Serverless charges on resources used and can be potentially cheaper depending on the workload.

2. "$82.8 /mo" for a 2 core 8GB server is actually just under 50.

3. European DC locations: 8 for both. Unsure what UpCloud means for them here[0], they look like actual, individual DCs, but AWS has 8 European regions. Each region has normally 3 AZs which are physically separate DCs (which can be in proximity or not) and can be composed of multiple DCs each. Plus there are localzones depending from certain regions, each with at least one DC (and there are 11 of those). So the AWS number is certainly over 30 if we compare apples to apples.

The rest I don't have time to dive in, or are just opinions (certifications needed for proficiency? really?)

>TBH, I would not trust AWS with countering the Patriot Act.

AWS China wouldn't have happened if they didn't offer enough safeguards. Complying with Patriot Act will guarantee enormous fines for AWS in the EU, so I'm sure legal and finance did their homework for AWS not to end up between a rock and a hard place.

[0] https://upcloud.com/data-centers

> AWS China wouldn't have happened if they didn't offer enough safeguards.

AWS China vs. AWS EU: Data centers in China are managed by Chinese companies, whereas DCs in the EU are managed by USA companies.

From a regulatory perspective, it's two different worlds. The Patriot Act can happen in the EU, not in China.

This is why GDPR does allow that EU user data is transferred to non-EU countries, but not to the USA.[0]

Furthermore, a discernible trend has emerged, attributable to the inadequacies in privacy regulations and suboptimal Trump geopolitical strategies with the EU, the EU is actively seeking better cloud services [1].

[0] https://gdpr-info.eu/issues/third-countries/

[1] https://www.wired.com/story/trump-us-cloud-services-europe/

From the thread:

  @discardableResult
  public init(priority: TaskPriority? = nil,
      operation: sending @escaping @isolated(any) () async -> Success)

> Take just the operation argument. It's a closure that is sending, escaping, declares any isolation (I don't understand this part very well yet), it's async and it returns Success. That's a whole bunch of facts - 7 to be precise - you need to know about just one parameter of this constructor. I understand that all 7 make sense and there's nothing you can do about it within the current strict concurrency model.

two of the three coalition parties are against it - the greens and the FDP (the social democrats are in favour), thus the government doesnt support.

they are neither far left/right

> they are neither far left/right

Are Linke and AfD are for chat control? They're by whom the coalition is being threatened.

The current government coalition is threatened by the CDU (centre-right), not by Linke (that has almost no voters left) or AfD (who no other party wants to form a coalition with).

The most likely outcome after the next election at this point looks like a coalition between the CDU and the Green party.

Unfortunately, CDU is probably in favour (they're pretty "law and order") and the Greens probably won't care enough to oppose strongly.

there already is an lsp available (officially from Apple).

Tried it out a month ago (on Linux using neovim) and the autocompletion was on par with golang lsp in terms of speed. Didnt check the lsp capabilities though.

Since 99% of people have to study hard to pass LC (medium/hard), it effectively acts as a selector for employee conformity. People who play by the rules imposed upon them, who work long hours if corp wants them to etc.

All the talk about diversity, but no diversity of thought. Only LC chasers. I genuinely believe this decreases innovation massively.

They're certainly proxies for other things.

>All the talk about diversity, but no diversity of thought. Only LC chasers. I genuinely believe this decreases innovation massively.

Nice belief, but good luck proving it.

I imagine the people grinding LC are harder working/more innovative than people who watched TV instead.

Yes, those are the only two options. I'd rather spend time with my kids than grind for 4 hours a day to get ghosted after the 5th round of interview.

If you spend your free time with kids you are outlier. Average adult in US watches 3 hours/day of TV (stats which frankly amazed me) which if spend more productiveky is more than enough to grind for interview

You were on to something with the GP's unprovable assertion.

Then you provided your own false dichotomy and the argument went all wrong.

Why are the two choices LC or TV? What about those who have a family, hobbies, etc?

The average American spends 3-4 hours per day on TV or Internet entertainment.

Sooo... its not much of a leap.

>I imagine the people grinding LC are harder working/more innovative than people who watched TV instead.

I suspect the original author of the article that spawned this comment thread prepared for the interview somewhat rather than watching TV instead - and still got sickened of the LT style interview.

Here you go: UFO - A UI-Focused Agent for Windows OS Interaction

"UFO is a UI-Focused dual-agent framework to fulfill user requests on Windows OS by seamlessly navigating and operating within individual or spanning multiple applications."

https://github.com/microsoft/UFO?tab=readme-ov-file

are you referring to the actual editor or to the plugins you used?

the editor itself has been very stable for me (daily usage) and the plugin ecosystem definitely offers so many choices that most of the time I can find stable/well-working ones for my use case.

Neovim core has lots of bugs.

Tried it out couple of days ago on Neovim but I got weird errors that I should "PyImport" instead of "import" statements.

So I just continued using pylsp with the ruff extension.