Ambivalence Towards Elixir's Distributed System Capabilities

Aaron Harpole shared his experiences and grievances with Elixir at the EMPEX LA 2019. His talk mainly revolved around his transition from Ruby to Elixir, his appreciation for Elixir's syntax and meta-programming capabilities, and his concerns with leveraging OTP for building distributed, scalable, and fault-tolerant systems. Despite his enthusiasm for the Elixir language and community, Aaron pointed out that transitioning to large-scale systems in Elixir is not as seamless as often advertised. He finds certain abstractions borrowed directly from Erlang to be unfamiliar and cumbersome for Elixir newcomers and suggests the need for further Elixir-native abstractions. Aaron mentions that while OTP (Open Telecom Platform) does a great job of abstracting complex operations, it falls short in providing the convenience needed for developers to confidently build fault-tolerant distributed systems that handle state in memory without fear of data loss from node failures. He also expressed a desire for higher-level libraries that would bridge this gap, both in terms of in-memory data handling and distributed node redundancy. Aaron's talk suggests that Elixir, while powerful, might be overemphasizing the ease of building large, fault-tolerant systems. He ends on an optimistic note, hoping that future developments in the Elixir landscape might make distributed system development significantly easier and more accessible.