[joisig]

I've used both heavily and I'd have to say no. You are in general better off with Elixir, with easy access to all Erlang and Elixir libraries, all BEAM functionality, a better package manager and build tool, and a more modern feeling / easier to learn programming language. Also starting to see a progressive type system and just a much faster developing ecosystem in general.

I think by now there's also more open source Elixir code out there, which means LLMs will be somewhat more proficient in Elixir (they're not great at it though, but enough to help).

It's harder to work in Erlang and incorporate Elixir libraries than the reverse, although it's certainly possible (you would use the mix build tool from Elixir to do so).

My main pros for Erlang are that it's a simpler language than Elixir with less "magic" and fewer footguns. I still use both, in the same system even, but most new code in the system is written in Elixir.

[jamal-kumar]

Oh boy. One of the things I have been doing to test if an LLM is 'there yet' by my standards is if it can spit out solutions in elixir without hallucinating packages that don't exist to get the job done. Since I haven't tested since chatgpt 4 came out I dunno where it's at for that but always felt like a decent litmus test.

[sbuttgereit]

I find that Claude 3.5 does a very admirable job. I only rarely see incorrect code and more frequently see recommendations for older libraries or obsolete versions of real libraries as compared to hallucinated libraries.

I've been playing with Claude 3.7 thinking and, perhaps unsurprisingly, I find it overthinks the problem or tries to do far more than I really want it to for any prompt. I expect that I'm just using the wrong tool, and probably should just use Claude 3.7.

Of course in all of this, I'm using the LLM in a "junior" capacity and I'm not giving it giant multi-faceted problems to solve: I'm giving it relatively narrow problems to solve at any one time and am guiding it through that process.

[ralphc]

It's still a good idea to look at an Erlang book like this one. Kind of like natural languages, it's handy to be able to read Erlang even if you don't or can't write it. There's a lot of older literature, Erlang, pre-Elixir, that is worthy of study.