Comment by jedmeyers

Comment by jedmeyers 18 hours ago

16 replies

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.

MeetingsBrowser 18 hours ago

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 ...

  • jedmeyers 16 hours ago

    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?...

    • DrewADesign 11 hours ago

      That’s one reason Apache shouldn’t have used essentially the same name as a well-known VM released more than 20 years prior.

    • MeetingsBrowser 15 hours ago

      This feels like willful ignorance.

      Can you really read the blog without realizing that there is a possibility this isn’t referring to Apache beam?

      • DrewADesign 12 hours ago

        Nearly every personal blog post submitted here written for people that use a less-mainstream tool/environment/language draws aggressively obtuse comments by people mad that the author didn’t anticipate their lack of knowledge.

    • Jtsummers 16 hours ago

      Who would look at something called The BEAM Book with a link to [1] and think that it refers to a book with a completely different title?

      [1] https://blog.stenmans.org/theBeamBook/

      • jedmeyers 14 hours ago

        Because of you ask a person who works on Beam about “the Beam book” thats the one they are going to recommend. Who knows that the BEAM book is literally called “the BEAM Book”? There are many books like that, “the SRE book” is actually Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems, etc.