Comment by chubot

I'm also looking at Elixir and Phoenix (coming from Python/C++), and it looks cool. Doing realtime features with Python requires something like Tornado / asyncio, which isn't ideal IMO.

I'm all for the immutable / message-passing architecture in the large, but I wish that you could just write Python-style code within processes. The VM copies all data structures at process boundaries anyway.

I think that language would be very popular!

I wrote Lisp 20 years ago, before Python, but now it feels a little annoying to "invert" all my code, for what seems like no benefit

e.g. from https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/elixir/

    defmodule Recursion do
      def sum_list([head | tail], acc) do
        sum_list(tail, acc + head)
      end

      def sum_list([], acc) do
       acc
      end
    end

I would rather just write

   def sum_list(L):
     result = 0
     for item in L:
       result += item
     return result

But then also have the Erlang VM to schedule processes and pass immutable messages.

There is obviously a builtin in Python that does this, and I'm sure there is a better way to do this in Elixir. But I think the general principle does hold.