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What makes Elixir a sort of "perfect storm" is the combination of a battle-tested, corporate funded, philosophically correct language model and VM (Erlang/BEAM/
by themgt 10y ago
What makes Elixir a sort of "perfect storm" is the combination of a battle-tested, corporate funded, philosophically correct language model and VM (Erlang/BEAM/OTP) combined with a syntax (Elixir) that's both beautiful and comprehensible to an average programmer.
Even if you loved Erlang, I'd argue the language is just too esoteric and jarring to most programmers to ever gain serious traction. I remember reading about Erlang's magic back in ~2007 (maybe [1]) and giving it a brief shot but deciding there was no way I wanted to look at that kind of code 8 hours a day. But coming from writing fairly FP-style Ruby/CoffeeScript/ES6-7, Elixir is feels only a step or two more down that path - in many ways actually conceptually simpler - and with enormous benefits.
[1] https://pragprog.com/articles/erlang https://pragprog.com/articles/erlang
- macintux 10y agoReplace "beautiful" with "familiar" please. I find Elixir uncomfortable because I left behind that syntax and have no desire to return to it.
- innocentoldguy 10y agoI think "beautiful" is subjective. I personally like Elixir's syntax a lot. It is concise, easy to read, and familiar. It also doesn't have all those unnecessary curly braces and parenthesis, which is nice. That's what makes it beautiful to me. I also like Elm's syntax, which I use for doing front end work on my Elixir projects. Both make me happy, and that's important when I have to stare at both of them all day, every day. If something else makes you happy, then that's what you should do all day, I suppose.