[lab14]

The message passing paradigm is called the "Actor Model" and was invented in the 70s IIRC. It's available in most programming languages and it's not something exclusive to Elixir by any means.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actor_model

[kylecazar]

Not exclusive to Elixir, but the BEAM was built from the ground-up around Actor for concurrency. Almost all other popular language ecosystems have it bolted on over time (with varying degrees of success) or relegated to a third party library. It's very natural and ergonomic in Elixir, because it's the paradigm of choice in the underlying vm.

Goroutines probably come closest.

[dpflan]

> It's very natural and ergonomic in Elixir, because it's the paradigm of choice in the underlying vm.

Thank you, this is the key factor -- a fundamental design decision that influences the foundation.

[dpflan]

Correct, it's not strictly unique to this. Even Ruby has it, but Ruby does not have BEAM/OTP.

Smalltalk was a fun language to work with, albeit academically.

[nasmorn]

Having built a mediumish soft realtime queue processing solution on rails I gotta say it was not great. If we didn’t kinda grow into it I would not have chosen ruby