Comment by efitz
Comment by efitz 18 hours ago
Maybe the post should explain what [a?] BEAM is, rather than invite the reader to go view a conference presentation recording.
Comment by efitz 18 hours ago
Maybe the post should explain what [a?] BEAM is, rather than invite the reader to go view a conference presentation recording.
Agreed.
The tone in which people like the parent comment is disgraceful. I’m sorry this is hacker news and hackers know that BEAM is the Erlang VM, no introduction or explanation needed. It is respected and admired as a great piece of engineering to be studied by all hackers.
Disgraceful? It's a pretty polite request.
> hackers know that BEAM is the Erlang VM, no introduction or explanation needed
This is some pretty intense gatekeeping, pal.
Can’t wait until we collectively drop whining about “gatekeeping”
I didn't know what it was, so I used the grand information retrieval device I was already sitting at to look it up
> I was always fascinated with BEAM (Bogdan Erlang Abstract Machine, a VM for languages like Erlang and Gleam) and how it allowed easy spawning of processes that didn’t share state, allowed for sending and selectively receiving messages, and linking to each other thus enabling creation of supervision trees.
That's all it takes. When you're writing about a niche topic (and nearly everything and anything interesting is a niche topic) then explain your jargon. It's considerate, reminds people who are familiar but might have forgotten, and introduces people unfamiliar with it to what your topic is.
Sometimes people want to understand what they're reading about and not have to play a little "guess what this is about" game. Clarity is a quality of good writing.
> It has really become tiring to have a comment tree on every HN post
Has it actually? Why is this "tiring?"
> When can we be done with these cheap comments?
Do what most other people did. Write a cheap reply.
> you are taking that time to write a comment that only detracts from a possible conversation.
Just click the little [-].
> maybe you just close it and move on.
Ironic.
You do have a point there. I did forget about the [-].
However, I read the comments in hopes they are interesting. If we have a culture where the "I don't know what this thing is"-type comment is popular, people will post those comments more and more. This leads other people to spend their time replying to it, instead of engaging with the content of the article. In other words, it distracts other commenters, who might otherwise have contributed something good.
Second, I think having low value comments is undesirable by itself. We could all start posting "First!" on articles, and everyone who hates that can simply minimize them. I think you can see why that would not be great. We can argue whether this is a low-value comment but I already did that in my original reply: it is not addressed to the article author (in this case they happened to show up but generally they don't) so the complaint doesn't lead to anything, and the comment complains about having to read about a concept they are not familiar with, but does the exact same thing itself.
Hn has for the most part always been like this.
I still remember 14 years ago or so, when applied science posted his diy electron microscope build and a handful of top comments were low effort nerd snipes and criticisms.
Nothing to do about it, I don't think. Its the warty culture here.
I think its written for people who already know what the BEAM is. The BEAM is the VM for Erlang or Elixir, similar to how Java has the JVM and C# has .NET essentially.
> similar to how Java has the JVM and C# has .NET essentially.
I'm pretty sure that in this analogy, C# has the CLR.
A lot of people know that Beam is an open-source unified programming model for defining data processing pipeline, both batch and streaming (B[atch and Str]eam), in a way that’s portable across different execution engines. That's why people are asking to clarify what Beam is before sending us to watch the conference recordings.
I think there are plenty of context clues in the first few sentences.
> ... fascinated with BEAM, how it allowed easy spawning of processes ...
> ... the appeal of BEAM languages ...
> ... haven’t read The BEAM Book yet ...
> ... examples are written in Elm ...
Those context clues do nothing for people who have no idea about BEAM but know about Beam and just think it's an uppercase version of it.
> ... fascinated with BEAM, how it allowed easy spawning of processes ...
beam runner spawns worker processes very easily
> ... the appeal of BEAM languages ...
You can write Beam workflows in Java, Python, Go and Scala
> ... haven’t read The BEAM Book yet ...
https://www.amazon.com/Streaming-Systems-Where-Large-Scale-P...
> ... examples are written in Elm ...
Hm, maybe they added Elm SDK for the Beam, but why?...
> This is my Code BEAM Europe 2025 talk, converted to a blogpost.
The blog is a text version of the talk, not an invitation to watch the talk.
...and LFE and Luerl and probably others that I'm forgetting.
I have an older list, but I don’t know how many of the links are still valid.
https://gist.github.com/macintux/6349828#alternative-languag...
When can we be done with these cheap comments? It has really become tiring to have a comment tree on every HN post for people who don't know what the article is about. As the author often didn't submit their own article it is just a complaint with no possible resolution. Instead of taking a few seconds to find out what the article is about and maybe even clarifying it for your fellow readers, you are taking that time to write a comment that only detracts from a possible conversation.
If you can't bring yourself to search for 5 seconds and find out what an article is about, maybe you just close it and move on.