alt Hacker News> that would be the reason why syntax does matter, wouldn't it? nobody wants leaky abstractions!
Well I thought we were describing our current reality, not our _desired_ one? Yes nobody wants leaky abstractions and yes they are everywhere.
Syntax matters insofar as to discourage bad habits, is what I'd refine from my previous statements. Most programmers go for the default so defaults and syntax that steers you the right way to think and write matter a lot.
That being said, people write FP Rust (myself included) and have plethora of JS libraries where immutability and FP patterns are the default. Which is a sad state of affairs but much better than nothing -- as it's introducing programmers to immutability and FP and they otherwise would never know.
> as evidenced by the fact that it has been implemented on top of a variety of runtimes with decent control over cross-runtime code reuse.
That was my top 1 reason to try it btw; I was intrigued by the fact that people are interested in making it work universally in at least two very different runtimes. To me that signals good language design and good architecture. Which I already knew; Clojure and Racket are amazing on their own.
> you're stating this as if it's a fact, but what is your evidence? afaik jvm has a very extensive actor model library (Akka) and clojure does include a solid STM implementation (https://clojure.org/reference/refs).
As already said multiple times in the thread -- my info is stale (as claimed by multiple posters).
That being said, has Akka started making full use of JVM's new green threads? Has Java itself started introducing immutability and STM / share-nothing as first-class citizens? If not, then by the "programmers reach for the defaults first" rule above I'd think Java is not yet ready. OK Clojure has these amazing libraries, kudos. Has anybody rolled up their sleeves and said "Alright, BEAM VM's reign is over, I am making the same or better runtime as them in Java / Clojure!"? If not, I'll not yet revisit.
I just don't want to deal with the endless pit of determinism bugs that global mutability nets us. The gift that keeps giving.
If Akka / Golang's runtime / Rust's various actor-emulating libraries catch up to the OTP, I'll very likely drop Erlang/Elixir because it's a struggle to have a good stable employment (or even contracting lately) with them.
Even if the BEAM VM is slower and has a few annoying sharp edges, its strengths nullify its weaknesses due to the nature of my work (HA web / API servers and also API gateways and orchestrators).
Replies
> That being said, has Akka started making full use of JVM's new green threads? Has Java itself started introducing immutability and STM / share-nothing as first-class citizens?
Amazing how it doesn't even cross your mind that there are trade-offs to those choices. Green threads are awesome, but guess what, they come at a cost. Same for share-nothing semantics.
> Has anybody rolled up their sleeves and said "Alright, BEAM VM's reign is over, I am making the same or better runtime as them in Java / Clojure!"?
You are again presupposing the BEAM has an absolute superiority over the JVM. "Better runtime" makes no sense on its own. Better is always relative to something. Better for whom? For what?
I'd bet that you work on a traditional CRUD enterprise software, and that IO(the database) is the real bottleneck of your app. In that case, sure, the BEAM is a solid choice(so is Python, Ruby and PHP nowadays). But let's please not pretend that is all there is to software engineering.
> That being said, has Akka started making full use of JVM's new green threads? Has Java itself started introducing immutability and STM / share-nothing as first-class citizens? If not, then by the "programmers reach for the defaults first" rule above I'd think Java is not yet ready.
> OK Clojure has these amazing libraries, kudos. Has anybody rolled up their sleeves and said "Alright, BEAM VM's reign is over, I am making the same or better runtime as them in Java / Clojure!"?
will akka use green threads? i'm sure it will when the developers behind it deem them useful.
will jvm add immutability, stm and share-nothing primitives that (i assume you allege) are missing? sure, i guess, when it becomes frequent enough ask.
you make it seem as if the world of software development is in some constant battle for supremacy, but it just isn't.
there is no "BEAM VM's reign". and if there was - it's unlikely that anybody would care to topple it. people just want to get their job done and they use whatever tools are available, familiar and convenient for them.
> I just don't want to deal with the endless pit of determinism bugs that global mutability nets us
and a lot of people agree with you. and there's a lot of tools that address that. and i can assure you, when working with clojure, even on the blasphemous mutable jvm runtime, that class of bugs is non-existent.