Fully Utilizing the BEAM: José Valim and Saša Jurić in live podcast episode hosted by Lars Wikman

✨This discussion was recorded at Code BEAM Europe 2023. If you're curious about our upcoming events check codebeamamerica.com and codebeamstockholm.com ✨
Whether you do Elixir, Erlang, Gleam or any of the others you are running on top of a uniquely capable runtime. The BEAM has a reputation for rock-solid reliability and unique facilities in realtime, concurrency and.. well, you've probably heard it all before.
But there is so much more to the BEAM. There are many parts with lots of potential that we are not fully utilizing today.
Lars Wikman sits down with The Erlangelist, Saša Jurić, and the creator of Elixir, José Valim, with the goal of getting their thoughts on what further potential they see in the BEAM. What should the community be exploring? What could we do that we currently are not?

[@elixirfun]

So exciting to be an Elixir developer!

[@BenjaminScherrey]

Actually I think one of the things that makes me prefer the Erlang space over the Elixir one is Elixir focuses so much on databases (often big "enterprisey" ones with lots of tables/relations) insomuch that most transactions end up hitting a database. Erlang systems focus a lot more on the actors and generally only incidentally hit databases which are typically much simpler and special purpose. There's nothing about Elixir that requires this but I believe it's the culture of Elixir and likely the fact that it was so heavily influenced by Ruby/Rails which was mostly DB-centric. This is why I think it's best for someone to learn Erlang and get experience building systems without focusing on the database before jumping over to Elixir if possible.

[@pertsevds]

I don't like Erlang syntax and I think that your phrase "Elixir focuses so much on databases" is more about person who's using it, not the language. In my work I'm using Elixir to pass messages and do queues, no DB at all.

[@BenjaminScherrey]

@@pertsevds hmmm it's as if you just decided you didn't like Erlang and stopped reading the rest of my post... 🤔🙄

[@pertsevds]

@@BenjaminScherrey no, I'm not. My point is that Elixir culture is not database centered and you can do anything Erlang does in Elixir. And Elixir got a better syntax.

[@BenjaminScherrey]

@@pertsevds claims "no I'm not" immediately preceeding his demonstration of "yes he is". 😎 Thanks for the chuckles.