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I expect an extreme version of this to be the future. Not just many cores, but many machines. My ETLs at work run on a spark cluster and are specified across programs organized in a separate DAG. That’s the kind of “program” with lots of head room to improve.

I’d bet future many-machine heterogeneous-resource languages will make that a lot easier.




Erlang and Elixir are already pretty strong in this regard.


Any ideas why the strengths of erlang and elixir haven’t made their way into the mainstream?


I would say that the strengths of Erlang have made their way into the mainstream, but into infrastructure and tooling rather than languages. I believe the reason for that is because the current crop of popular mainstream languages will never forsake their imperative roots. Erlang's true strength is that it approaches the distributed computing problem from first principles, which yields a language that feels right to work with in that domain; whereas the mainstream attempts to shoehorn distributed computing onto an imperative foundation, which has always been very awkward since it's really just trying to square a circle.




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