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I just find the Erlang style bizarre. I know it's a great language but I'm really don't see myself going the extra mile. I think Django is a good mid level fram

by Cyph0n 11y ago

I just find the Erlang style bizarre. I know it's a great language but I'm really don't see myself going the extra mile. I think Django is a good mid level framework that is good enough performance-wise for most cases. I'm now learning Play and Scala to take cover those high demand edge cases.

izym 11y ago
Phoenix is for the Elixir language which runs on the ErlangVM, and not for the Erlang language.
- Cyph0n 11y ago
  Yes, I am aware of that. Elixir runs on the VM and as far as I know adopts many constructs from Erlang.
  - innocentoldguy 11y ago
    What do you mean by that? If you mean Elixir borrows some of Erlang's esoteric data structures, like lists, then yes, you are correct. However, the language itself doesn't look anything like Erlang. It resembles Ruby more than anything else.
    - derefr 11y ago
      > esoteric data structures, like lists I know they're not common in modern HLLs since we have magic do-everything array ADTs, but I find it kind of hilarious to describe (singly-)linked lists as "esoteric." Personally, I enjoy having (really cheap) lists around, and wish more HLLs had them as one of their fundamental, low-level abstractions. There's something extremely satisfying about accumulating elements backward by consing, and then reversing at the end. I'm always worried in Ruby/Python that push()ing elements onto an Array might do all sorts of stupid re-allocations at just the wrong time; lists, on the other hand, have extremely obvious time-space complexities for all their operations. That's something that can be said about all the Erlang ADTs, now that I think about it—each one has been carefully considered such that you can guess the time/space complexity for each operation and be correct. Erlang (and Elixir) also has a policy that if two ADTs both have an operation with the same semantics, but the two operations have different complexities, then the two operations will get different names—which is amazing for making bad ideas (like trying to do random-access on a list) obvious. (And really, while we're on the subject, it's tuples that are the weird Erlang type. As handy as they are as an underlying implementation for records et al, there isn't really much theoretical basis for having a set of N fixed-size non-enumerable product types, each with integer-indexed, untyped slots.)
  - methehack 11y ago
    Elixir feels like the functional language a ruby programmer might create. When you're programming in it, it feels like 90% of the power of ruby with 10% of the features. Instead of being constraining, I find the relative lack of features (compared to ruby) liberating. Elixir also has a supremely powerful and elegant macro capability that lets you build really powerful DSLs. For example, chunks of the language are written as Elixir macros -- the if 'keyword', for instance. As a programmer, you have full access to the very same macro system. Writing an unless 'expression' isn't even that hard. phoenix's use of Elixir's macro system is part of why phoenix can feel so much like rails. And yes, from the fragments I've seen of Erlang, the two are completely different. What Elixir wants from Erlang is primarily the VM and the OTP libraries. If you've seen Erlang and it scares you off Elixir, you've got it all wrong.
simoncion 11y ago
> I just find the Erlang style bizarre. It's odd at first, but has a few things going for it: * Its rules are consistent. * There are few keywords and symbols. * Once you understand it, you see that pattern matching on function heads or case statements is exactly the same as if/else statements. * Its standard library contains code that does a lot of the low-to-mid-level stuff you find yourself doing. * OTP provides nice templates for server-ish things and FSMs, as well as some nice conventions that get followed by a lot of Erlang software.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
rozap 11y ago
The notion that Erlang is bizarre but Scala isn't is a particularly intriguing notion...but that's a different rant. I suppose the concurrency model of Erlang is a departure from The Way Things Are, but I'd argue that's a good thing. The JVM doesn't offer much fundamentally different in terms of the concurrency model than Ruby and Python. It certainly performs orders of magnitudes better, but it's still subject to a lot of the same issues: you have a pool of threads running your http service, and when you exhaust that pool then you have outages. And stopping the world for GC is enormously problematic. Erlang takes care of all that in an extremely elegant way. Also it doesn't take minutes (!!!) to compile an Elixir (or Erlang) program. Developer happiness is often overlooked (Scala being the worst offender in my experience) and Elixir really hits that out of the park.
- meowface 11y ago
  I've been comparing Erlang, Elixir, and Scala lately, and Scala seems to have both a nicer syntax and a nicer feature set than the former two. Scala is definitely C++-esque in being a bloated language. And it lets developers commit utter horrors. But if you stay away from those horrors (mostly new operators and DSLs) and don't use them yourself, it seems like a very nice and elegant language. You get the same functional programming and actor concurrency you would get form Erlang and Elixir.

by Cyph0n 11y ago

izym 11y ago

Phoenix is for the Elixir language which runs on the ErlangVM, and not for the Erlang language.

Cyph0n 11y ago
Yes, I am aware of that. Elixir runs on the VM and as far as I know adopts many constructs from Erlang.
- innocentoldguy 11y ago
  What do you mean by that? If you mean Elixir borrows some of Erlang's esoteric data structures, like lists, then yes, you are correct. However, the language itself doesn't look anything like Erlang. It resembles Ruby more than anything else.
  - derefr 11y ago
    > esoteric data structures, like lists I know they're not common in modern HLLs since we have magic do-everything array ADTs, but I find it kind of hilarious to describe (singly-)linked lists as "esoteric." Personally, I enjoy having (really cheap) lists around, and wish more HLLs had them as one of their fundamental, low-level abstractions. There's something extremely satisfying about accumulating elements backward by consing, and then reversing at the end. I'm always worried in Ruby/Python that push()ing elements onto an Array might do all sorts of stupid re-allocations at just the wrong time; lists, on the other hand, have extremely obvious time-space complexities for all their operations. That's something that can be said about all the Erlang ADTs, now that I think about it—each one has been carefully considered such that you can guess the time/space complexity for each operation and be correct. Erlang (and Elixir) also has a policy that if two ADTs both have an operation with the same semantics, but the two operations have different complexities, then the two operations will get different names—which is amazing for making bad ideas (like trying to do random-access on a list) obvious. (And really, while we're on the subject, it's tuples that are the weird Erlang type. As handy as they are as an underlying implementation for records et al, there isn't really much theoretical basis for having a set of N fixed-size non-enumerable product types, each with integer-indexed, untyped slots.)
- methehack 11y ago
  Elixir feels like the functional language a ruby programmer might create. When you're programming in it, it feels like 90% of the power of ruby with 10% of the features. Instead of being constraining, I find the relative lack of features (compared to ruby) liberating. Elixir also has a supremely powerful and elegant macro capability that lets you build really powerful DSLs. For example, chunks of the language are written as Elixir macros -- the if 'keyword', for instance. As a programmer, you have full access to the very same macro system. Writing an unless 'expression' isn't even that hard. phoenix's use of Elixir's macro system is part of why phoenix can feel so much like rails. And yes, from the fragments I've seen of Erlang, the two are completely different. What Elixir wants from Erlang is primarily the VM and the OTP libraries. If you've seen Erlang and it scares you off Elixir, you've got it all wrong.

simoncion 11y ago

> I just find the Erlang style bizarre. It's odd at first, but has a few things going for it: * Its rules are consistent. * There are few keywords and symbols. * Once you understand it, you see that pattern matching on function heads or case statements is exactly the same as if/else statements. * Its standard library contains code that does a lot of the low-to-mid-level stuff you find yourself doing. * OTP provides nice templates for server-ish things and FSMs, as well as some nice conventions that get followed by a lot of Erlang software.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

rozap 11y ago

The notion that Erlang is bizarre but Scala isn't is a particularly intriguing notion...but that's a different rant. I suppose the concurrency model of Erlang is a departure from The Way Things Are, but I'd argue that's a good thing. The JVM doesn't offer much fundamentally different in terms of the concurrency model than Ruby and Python. It certainly performs orders of magnitudes better, but it's still subject to a lot of the same issues: you have a pool of threads running your http service, and when you exhaust that pool then you have outages. And stopping the world for GC is enormously problematic. Erlang takes care of all that in an extremely elegant way. Also it doesn't take minutes (!!!) to compile an Elixir (or Erlang) program. Developer happiness is often overlooked (Scala being the worst offender in my experience) and Elixir really hits that out of the park.

meowface 11y ago
I've been comparing Erlang, Elixir, and Scala lately, and Scala seems to have both a nicer syntax and a nicer feature set than the former two. Scala is definitely C++-esque in being a bloated language. And it lets developers commit utter horrors. But if you stay away from those horrors (mostly new operators and DSLs) and don't use them yourself, it seems like a very nice and elegant language. You get the same functional programming and actor concurrency you would get form Erlang and Elixir.