Seeking guidance - which BEAM language for me?

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Howdy!

Long time interested into erlang. Learned the language some time ago but I did not had a project that justified the process of learning new tools, libraries, etc.
But I finally have one!

Now I’m in doubt about picking erlang (no problem with the syntax), going with elixir which, from my point of view —please correct me if I’m wrong, it looks like it has more development in these days.
Also gleam caught my attention, but not sure if it is in a very early stage (saw otp limitations here GitHub - gleam-lang/otp: 📫 Fault tolerant multicore programs with actors).

Also I don’t know how good is the interoperability between those i.e can I use phoenix web server with erlang code?

Most of my work happens on backend applications for the web i.e to make services for the ecommerce sector. Usually connecting to more than one database, doing some background processing, serving rest apis and stuff like that.

With that in mind, can you give me some guidance? There are a bunch of languages for the beam!

Thank you in advance

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Probably the two most important things will be your preference to syntax, and tooling (or just tooling if you’re not bothered by which syntax you use). Erlang, Elixir and Gleam all have great communities, and again which you prefer will boil down to preference.

With regards to Phoenix, I think a few people have tried to use it in Erlang but because it makes heavy use of macros it is not as straightforward as you might like, so if you have a strong preference for Phoenix then Elixir may be worth looking at. Don’t forget Erlang has a number of web frameworks as well:

Chicago Boss Forum (tho not used much nowadays as far as I can tell)
Nitrogen Forum
Nova Forum
Zotonic Forum

I think Gleam has a framework built by the creator of Raxx as well (Raxx is an Elixir web framework).

Very true - just pick one and jump aboard the Erlang/BEAM family :smiley:

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