3 ms·
As someone who has gone from Ruby -> Erlang -> Elixir, I'm both thrilled and terrified by the culture developing. On one hand, you have a very similar open sou
by phamilton 11y ago
As someone who has gone from Ruby -> Erlang -> Elixir, I'm both thrilled and terrified by the culture developing.
On one hand, you have a very similar open source culture to what exists in Ruby. The fact that hex.pm exists alone is amazing. Libraries are expected to work, be documented, and be maintained.
On the other hand, the number of questions that can be answered with RTFM is astoundingly high. Where Erlang has an implicit knowledge requirement regarding OTP and distributed systems in general, Elixir has a much lower barrier to entry in the community.
An Example: On one of my libraries (a db driver) I have received multiple requests for "Add section to README on how to use this with Phoenix". I have a section on how to add to a supervision tree, which from the erlang world is overkill, and I expect users to be able to connect the dots.
That said, the core team is pretty dang smart. There's plenty of OTP wisdom there, and they aren't very quick to give into the mob rule of the community. It's under strong guidance.
- thijsb 11y agoCan you provide some good reading material? I've been looking for some, but except the elixir docs and phoenix website, at lot of resources that I have found are outdated or poorly written.
- phamilton 11y agoIf you want to truly understand Elixir, go through the book/site Learn You Erlang For Great Good. Understand it in Erlang, then apply it in Elixir. Once you get a feel for how to translate idioms from one to another, everything will be much easier, since you can turn to either community for information. You'll find that an undocumented library follows one of a small handful of designs and a quick peek into the source is all you really need. Once you get the Erlang->Elixir relationship, I recommend Erlang in Anger.