Elixir was born from greatness : elixir

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2022-05-20 00:00:08

Erlang is the best designed language in the history of computing. The late Joe Armstrong is one of the most underappreciated figures in Computer Science. He should get due credit for the sheer brilliance of Erlang's programming paradigm. Fault tolerance should have been a top priority of every language's design. Instead, constructs like null types and try/catch blocks were foisted on the world by designers of much more famous languages. Unfortunately, programming error is an inevitable sin. Armstrong knew this well and designed Erlang with this in mind. Other language creators failed miserably by continuing to repeat the same mistakes, and the world is a worse place because of them.

Armstrong also understood the power of pattern matching to improve the validation and interpretability of programs. Pattern matching achieves this through its precise declaration of program requirements. It is even better at catching unexpected input than a vanilla type declaration system, and it makes programs more understandable with descriptive pattern-matching signatures of functions. And these functions are nothing more than transformations on immutable input data, with no unexpected side effects on program state. As they should be, which tangentially segues to the next point.

Imperative languages descended from C are God-awful for parallel computing. Multi-threading in these languages is nothing but a hack and an afterthought prone to causing even more errors of the non-deterministic variety. Functional programming and doing away with shared state is the best way to leverage multi-core and distributed computing in the modern age. And Erlang does this beautifully.