Why I wrote the BEAM book (2025) (happihacking.com)
116 points by zenincognito 2 days ago
neya 10 hours ago
Oh wow, I never knew Klarna uses BEAM. I always thought BEAM is vastly underrated and it's even hard for me to convince clients of showing how powerful it (Elixir/BEAM) really is, especially when they're already on something like NodeJS. This will be a nice reference to use in conversations with future prospects.
vmg12 3 minutes ago
To add on to your statement that the BEAM is vastly underrated, it's the only runtime that I know of that has enabled multiple small sub 50 people teams to scale to millions of daily active users.
jurgemaister 3 hours ago
One of the early investors worked for Ericsson on Erlang.
troupo an hour ago
Klarna was one of the biggest Erlang shops in 2010s. Then there was some turmoil, but their main system is still in Erlang
worthless-trash 6 hours ago
I'm interested to see how this goes, I find it difficult to convince anyone to change from the herp-derp status quo.
oivaksef 6 hours ago
There will be winners in this new AI age, and they will be the ones that are technically better, rather than the most popular or convenient for software engineers
thibaut_barrere 5 hours ago
I use Elixir (BEAM-based), with LLMs daily, on a fast growing site (current pace is 5 billion HTTP queries per year on a single front node).
Elixir is well handled by LLMs at this point, and we keep the “easy to scale and maintain” aspect (operational characteristics of the runtime are very good).
I can safely say that total cost of ownership is excellent.
valzam 5 hours ago
I think that's the first time I see someone use qpy...
thibaut_barrere 4 hours ago
pjmlp 2 hours ago
All 3GL languages are looser in the AI age, beyond formal verification tooling.
I have done several experiments where, the only difference are a couple of paragraphs describing the technology stack for the AI tools.
Hardly any different than changing the target CPU architecture on a compiler output.
Quite sad, as now the fun of why language X instead of Y is gone.
aeonfox 2 hours ago
> I have done several experiments where, the only difference are a couple of paragraphs describing the technology stack for the AI tools.
The differences emerge as the project goes on. Comparing feature velocity and defect count is difficult unless your experiment is to build the same project over a long timeframe across several languages. Then winners would indeed emerge, but then that's only in the context of whatever domain said project is tackling. For instance, if concurrency or infrastructure isn't a large part of the complexity, BEAM languages might not confer much benefit.
te_chris 4 hours ago
Elixir is perfect for the ai age as it allows you to move a lot of orchestration safely into the application layer.
bpbp-mango 2 hours ago
thank you. I've not had time to learn Erlang but always been intrigued by beamp + otp. now with llms I might have a chance to see what's possible
ValtteriL 5 hours ago
I love Erlang, Elixir, and BEAM by extension. Lucky to have been forced to learn it at KTH.
sharts 4 hours ago
Perhaps github should read it