6 ms·

Fun is in the eye of the beholder. I'm worried that Elixir will take off because it's "hip" and ruin the chances for other people to use a pure and consistent l

by 9919839219 10y ago

Fun is in the eye of the beholder. I'm worried that Elixir will take off because it's "hip" and ruin the chances for other people to use a pure and consistent language (Erlang) at work. It is amazing what kind of middleware bloat is forced unto people these days.

qaq 10y ago
hip is one thing, we primarily do web dev. so good unicode support & Phoenix are big selling points.
- careersuicide 10y ago
  If you haven't read the code for how Elixir handles Unicode support [0] I highly recommend doing so. At compile time it reads from several Unicode Character Database text files [1] and then defines a whole slew of functions using the contents of the files that take advantage of pattern matching via unquoting. I already knew all about pattern matching before I came across this but I was still absolutely floored by how awesome this is. In the past when working with C I've needed to do something similar but it required running an external tool whose output was a .c file. It worked but it was hardly elegant. [0]: https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir/blob/master/lib/elixir/unicode/unicode.ex https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir/blob/master/lib/elixir... [1]: http://www.unicode.org/Public/8.0.0/ucd/ http://www.unicode.org/Public/8.0.0/ucd/
  - qaq 10y ago
    Yep very elegant solution
factotum 10y ago
One person's middleware bloat is another's power tool.
sotojuan 10y ago
One could argue that Erlang/OTP has had decades to be used at work, and no one wanted to (sadly). Elixir taking over doesn't affect Erlang because Erlang wouldn't had become more popular over time anyway.
- vegabook 10y ago
  I personally am doing BEAM now mainly because of Elixir. It's undeniable that a "hip", and let's face it, young, crowd, having chosen Erlang/BEAM, gives it a big breath of fresh air (this is NOT to insult the experienced Erlang devs - it's just a fact that a new young crowd choosing your tech is an endorsement). Interestingly though, I'm more and more intrigued by the underlying technology. Personally I am not a fan of some of Elixir's design choices f.() versus f() for example, and maybe, just maybe, I'll do Erlang now. Overall though, it was a total blast the other day to just run 10 000 processes so easily, within milliseconds, and watch all my cores go to max without messing with threads or even the (somewhat obtuse) Go channels. Actors really are easy to reason about. I like this model so much that I'm even looking at it for C (C++ Actor Framework).
  - infinite8s 10y ago
    I'd be interested to hear about your experience with the C++ Actor Framework. It seems like without the larger ecosystem of Erlang/BEAM for fault tolerance CAF is just a nice coroutine library.

qaq 10y ago

hip is one thing, we primarily do web dev. so good unicode support & Phoenix are big selling points.

careersuicide 10y ago
If you haven't read the code for how Elixir handles Unicode support [0] I highly recommend doing so. At compile time it reads from several Unicode Character Database text files [1] and then defines a whole slew of functions using the contents of the files that take advantage of pattern matching via unquoting. I already knew all about pattern matching before I came across this but I was still absolutely floored by how awesome this is. In the past when working with C I've needed to do something similar but it required running an external tool whose output was a .c file. It worked but it was hardly elegant. [0]: https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir/blob/master/lib/elixir/unicode/unicode.ex https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir/blob/master/lib/elixir... [1]: http://www.unicode.org/Public/8.0.0/ucd/ http://www.unicode.org/Public/8.0.0/ucd/
- qaq 10y ago
  Yep very elegant solution

factotum 10y ago

One person's middleware bloat is another's power tool.

sotojuan 10y ago

One could argue that Erlang/OTP has had decades to be used at work, and no one wanted to (sadly). Elixir taking over doesn't affect Erlang because Erlang wouldn't had become more popular over time anyway.

vegabook 10y ago
I personally am doing BEAM now mainly because of Elixir. It's undeniable that a "hip", and let's face it, young, crowd, having chosen Erlang/BEAM, gives it a big breath of fresh air (this is NOT to insult the experienced Erlang devs - it's just a fact that a new young crowd choosing your tech is an endorsement). Interestingly though, I'm more and more intrigued by the underlying technology. Personally I am not a fan of some of Elixir's design choices f.() versus f() for example, and maybe, just maybe, I'll do Erlang now. Overall though, it was a total blast the other day to just run 10 000 processes so easily, within milliseconds, and watch all my cores go to max without messing with threads or even the (somewhat obtuse) Go channels. Actors really are easy to reason about. I like this model so much that I'm even looking at it for C (C++ Actor Framework).
- infinite8s 10y ago
  I'd be interested to hear about your experience with the C++ Actor Framework. It seems like without the larger ecosystem of Erlang/BEAM for fault tolerance CAF is just a nice coroutine library.