Skip to content

Commit

Permalink
Fix a rendering issue for 'BEAM'
Browse files Browse the repository at this point in the history
  • Loading branch information
chriskrycho committed Nov 6, 2023
1 parent cbcbd7a commit ee37ad9
Showing 1 changed file with 1 addition and 1 deletion.
2 changes: 1 addition & 1 deletion site/library/Seven Languages in Seven Weeks.md
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -58,7 +58,7 @@ The choice of languages has definitely aged in uneven ways:

- [Scala](https://scala-lang.org) was probably at the very peak of its popularity to date as the book came out. Many of the Bay Area tech companies were adopting it as a Java replacement, leaning into its hybrid model which mixed object-oriented and functional idioms.[^less-novel] Unfortunately, the combination of a slow compiler, poor data structure performance in the early days, and the reality that most programmers just ended up using it as Java with a really weird syntax meant that it ended up with a bad reputation in the Valley and receded to a niche space for functional programming enthusiasts who needed or wanted to run on the <abbr title="Java virtual machine">JVM</abbr>. The folks who preferred <abbr title="object oriented">OO</abbr> had a much smaller learning curve and more familiar syntax to just use [Kotlin]

- [Erlang](https://www.erlang.org) itself does not seem to have grown much in popularity as a language, though it definitely had a nice little spike of interest when people realized just how effective it was for pre-acquisition WhatsApp.[^rewrite] However, the [<span class="smcp">BEAM</span>](https://www.erlang.org/blog/a-brief-beam-primer/) <abbr title="virtual machine">VM</abbr> has become and increasingly popular target for *other* languages, starting with Elixir but now including quite a few others. Somewhat bizarrely to me, despite the boom in microservices in the 2010s, relatively few people seem to have taken a serious look at what Erlang and the <span class="smcp">BEAM</span> bring to the table.
- [Erlang](https://www.erlang.org) itself does not seem to have grown much in popularity as a language, though it definitely had a nice little spike of interest when people realized just how effective it was for pre-acquisition WhatsApp.[^rewrite] However, the [<abbr>BEAM</abbr>](https://www.erlang.org/blog/a-brief-beam-primer/) <abbr title="virtual machine">VM</abbr> has become and increasingly popular target for *other* languages, starting with Elixir but now including quite a few others. Somewhat bizarrely to me, despite the boom in microservices in the 2010s, relatively few people seem to have taken a serious look at what Erlang and the <abbr>BEAM</abbr> bring to the table.

- [Clojure](https://clojure.org) had a bit of a boom at the same time and for a few years after the book came out. Growth seems to have leveled off, in part I suspect because the aforementioned Kotlin took a lot of the energy in the <abbr title="Java virtual machine">JVM</abbr> world, and with a far lower “activation energy” than jumping into a Lisp—even a well-designed one. It has not gone anywhere, but like Ruby seems to have stabilized (and perhaps peaked), at least for now—but as with Ruby, the future is unclear.

Expand Down

0 comments on commit ee37ad9

Please sign in to comment.