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Understand Erlang in what sense? You would still write Elixir code but would need to understand Erlang code and syntax because there is larger amount of docs an

• SEMW 10y ago
  I'm not the person you replied to, but I feel the same way as they do. A fair proportion of libraries I've been using are Erlang libraries. That's not a problem -- one of the best things about Elixir is that you have that mature ecosystem to lean on. But inevitably with libraries, if you push them hard you get to a stage where you need to read the code to understand what they're doing, fix a bug, maybe add a feature or two. (Or at a minimum, understand their docs & examples, which'll be in erlang) Eg I use sockjs-erlang from elixir, and found myself forking it (https://github.com/SimonWoolf/sockjs-erlang/commits/master https://github.com/SimonWoolf/sockjs-erlang/commits/master) to fix a couple bugs and keep it up to date, since it's now more or less unmaintained by sockjs.
• dudul 10y ago
  Elixir maintainers very often do not reinvent the wheel. When there is a good library in Erlang they do not re-write it in Elixir. Therefore, an Elixir developer should be able to read Erlang documentation and code. You won't miss anything in Elixir that you can do in Erlang, simply because you can call Erlang code from Elixir, including all the libraries.
• loxs 10y ago
  For example, at one point (presumably very soon) you'll need to understand the difference between Erlang strings (char lists) and Erlang binaries which are called "strings" in Elixir. There might be quite a lot of confusion if you don't understand the context in which Elixir lives.
  • andy_ppp 10y ago
    It is in the 6th section of the Elixir Getting Started Guide: http://elixir-lang.org/getting-started/binaries-strings-and-char-lists.html http://elixir-lang.org/getting-started/binaries-strings-and-...
    • loxs 10y ago
      Yeah, I was just giving an example. Not saying that this in particular will be a stumbling stone.