[Name_Chawps]

I'm a junior Elixir dev.

I write concurrent code without much extra effort compared to non-concurrent code. Elixir makes it easy.

[eropple]

You can do that easily in modern Java--even for older JVMs, tools like Netty and later Vertx have been around forever. Or in Node, even more easily.

Elixir/BEAM do have some benefits that are worth considering for many projects. But they absolutely are not special in this regard, and that's the junior-developer trap about which the person to whom you replied was referring.

[OkayPhysicist]

You may be enamored with the "nothing new under the sun" idea that "Turing complete is Turing complete, anything you can do in Python you can do in Brainfuck" but as someone who has written code professionally in about a dozen languages, no, you can't just as easily get the same kind of parallelism out of Java as you can Elixir. To assert otherwise is factually false.

Is it possible to get to the same result? Yes. It is not, however, anywhere in Elixir's ballpark of "easily". Do not discount the power of language-level, not just support, but encouragement. Especially when you're working with junior devs, if "the right thing" and "the thing the language wants you to write" are not in alignment, everything is much, much harder. Erlang and Elixir actively encourage easily parallelized code. Java activity encourages tangles of objects.

[Volundr]

Java, kind of with Akka or similar, although even with that one always be aware of blocking. Loom should help. Node: not really unless something dramatic has changed. Using 32 cores is going to require 32 separate node (OS level) processes, and your on your own for providing communication between them, plus callbacks aren't near as intuitive as the BEAM process model (think green threads)

[collaborative]

I'm a seasoned Java and Node developer, but have never touched Elixir/Erlang. Could you spell out for me the benefits Elixir provides over Java concurrent code? Is it actually a performance gain, or simply a nicer syntax? I am a bit confused by the claims of this post and of the earlier comment. Thanks a lot