Erlang The Movie II: The Sequel

Not at all. Have you ever thought about caching Twitter? It's an archetypical example of a site that's extremely difficult to cache well, which is the source of so many of its scaling problems. Every person's new feed is uniquely generated based on their followers. That means you can only at best cache at the individual tweet level -- you still need to uniquely generate a news feed for each user. This means that for every user you need to individually grab information simultaneously from the same high velocity tweets, while still being able to present information to each user uniquely based on conditions regarding how twitter should display tweets for that specific user individually. That's incredibly demanding data wise because it makes horizontal distribution of load much more difficult --- a huge number of people are all making demands on the same set of data resources, and you can't easily cache that data because of how real time and quickly updating it is. In comparison WhatsApp on Erlang is basically just an example of extremely dramatic real time horizontal scaling. Hosting hundreds of millions of simultaneous chats is relatively trivial in Erlang, given each one is operating under its own separately scalable chat process. Since very few chats share data with one another, horizontal scaling is easy because you don't have the issue of the same resource getting called simultaneously by millions of unique users at the same time, who all need that resource represented back

A lot of Elixir folks try to claim that the syntax doesn't matter. They're lying to themselves: of course the syntax matters. Not only is it much easier and more consistent for the human brain to parse (even more so than Ruby, in my opinion; unlike Ruby, everything that should take a block - like 'def' and 'defmodule' - do (pun intended) take a block), but it also goes above and beyond what Erlang offers with things like its pipe operator ('|>'), macro support, defaulting to binary strings (if you use double-quotes; single quotes are Erlang-style lists of characters, which - while they have their uses (aside from the obvious interoperability with Erlang code) - aren't really as efficient), and (in my observation) greater consistentcy between what you can do in the REPL ('iex') and what you can do in actual source files. They're both great languages, but I think Elixir is a bit more refined, learning from Erlang's advantages and disadvantages and improving on them. It's basically what you get if you watch "Erlang The Movie II: The Sequel" [0] and actually try to write a language for Ruby hipsters with excellent taste in noserings while humming along to Bananarama :) [0]: [this video]