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I really want to love Elixir, but man, it fundamentally hasn't succeeded in producing a readable, expressive language. Look at his implementations! They're a

I really want to love Elixir, but man, it fundamentally hasn't succeeded in producing a readable, expressive language. Look at his implementations! They're a mess of gobbledegook just like Erlang, plus a bunch of weird magic on top that's not very intuitive. Syntax aside, the final implementation of this feels like, okay, well, you have access to an in-memory store that's outside of the GC and which works well for your use case here. I'd actually be more interested in further optimizations of the first approach, in-GC, which seem like they'd be more generalizable to other tasks.

naringas 10y ago
I'm interested in Elixir, but I don't know all that much about it (yet). Could you elaborate on what you mean by "mess of gobbledegook just like Erlang"? thanks
tomphoolery 10y ago
In my opinion, Elixir is still a more expressive and readable language than Erlang, and if you want to do OTP programming it's the best we have so far. Learning more about OTP has warmed me a little to the syntax of both Elixir and Erlang, because I'm now able to understand the syntactical choices that were made in order to express what's going on under the hood more clearly. As a Rubyist, I also enjoy Elixir's similarities to Ruby, and had to get over how it looked to me for a while before I really understood why it felt so weird to write. It might be a form of Stockholm Syndrome, but these days it makes sense to me so I sort-of enjoy how it works and looks.
ShaneWilton 10y ago
I'm curious about what aspects of the syntax you consider to be unreadable. Elixir code tends to be terse (though less terse than something like Haskell), but I wouldn't call it gobbledegook. The server implementation [0], for example, is 25 lines and handles a lot behind the scenes. Those 25 lines are all you need to define a process that can leverage all of the supervision and hot code reloading benefits offered by OTP. There's a lot going on, but it's mostly just pattern matching tuples and maps, and it only takes a few hours of messing around with Erlang or Elixir before that kind of thing stops looking so scary. [0] https://github.com/sasa1977/erlangelist/blob/master/examples/buffer/lib/buffer/server.ex https://github.com/sasa1977/erlangelist/blob/master/examples...
- aetherson 10y ago
  Sure, like this: %__MODULE__{buffer | size: buffer.size + 1, queue: :queue.in(item, buffer.queue)} So that involves a bunch of operators that are very specialized to Elixir -- the %, the | are both very unclear in my opinion. And the __MODULE__ construction is clumsy. Or worse: {:ok, { :ets.lookup_element(buffer.ets, pull_index, 2), %__MODULE__{buffer | size: buffer.size - 1, pull_index: rem(pull_index + 1, buffer.max_size) } }} Same problem as above, plus the nested set structures that Erlang loves, but which rapidly become super difficult to decipher. Oh, and also the overloading of atoms to work like pseudo-objects.
  - ShaneWilton 10y ago
    I agree that your second code example is difficult to read, but I think that is more a result of a lot of logic being inlined into one call, than it is a property of the language. % and | are going to be unclear if you're an outsider looking in on the language, but that is true for any sort of specialization. I'd be interested to know what languages you find to be readable, because I can all but guarantee that there's aspects of that language that I'd find arcane -- not because they are, but because I don't know the language. I'm not terribly interested in discussing whether a language is readable or not, because a lot of that is going to come down to subjective opinion, but at the end of the day, I find that Elixir lets me quickly write maintainable code. I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "overloading of atoms to work like pseudo-objects", do you mind elaborating?
    - aetherson 10y ago
      Probably too late to reply, but I mean things like :ets.method or :queue.whatever.
      - karmajunkie 10y ago
        What you might be missing is that modules names are just atoms, and thats how you get to erlang libraries/applications in elixir. In "MyApp.whatever" MyApp is also an atom. It's not any kind of overloading or object fakeout at all. The use of __MODULE__ just refers to the current module, and its use is quite common. It's perfectly idiomatic and straightforward to read if you've written enough erlang or elixir to recognize the syntactic elements without the translation hiccup. At this point I find Elixir code a great deal easier to read than a lot of ruby, php, or C++ code I've had to work with in the past. While it may not really be your cup of tea, you can't fairly accuse it of something that has more to go with the reader than the writer.
plainOldText 10y ago
I personally find Elixir to be a very readable, expressive and thoughtful language. I agree, Erlang not so much. Would you care to elaborate which parts you consider to be "gobbledegook"? The code supplied is just a few lines of code. I don't know how familiar are you with the language, but the magical aspect of it will quickly disappear once your learn a few OTP patterns. I personally started initially with Erlang, but when I discovered Elixir, I switched, as I found it way more pleasurable. Python and Elixir are actually the only two languages that make me happy when writing code, and I've tried quite a few of them, from C all the way to Haskell.
- ShaneWilton 10y ago
  > I agree, Erlang not so much. I thought the same thing once, until I actually sat down and tried to learn Erlang. It turns out that a lot of the decisions that I originally thought were asinine, actually make a lot of sense. Line terminators for example (, ; .) tend to receive a lot of flak, but they really aren't as crazy as they first seem. Commas come after normal lines of code (you can read them as and), semicolons come at the end of clauses in if or case statements (and you can read them as or), and periods mark the end of a function. It's a little more verbose than something like Javascript or Ruby, but it really isn't as confusing as critics tend to claim!
  - plainOldText 10y ago
    Oh, absolutely. I'm sure the Erlang inventors weren't crazy, and most of their choices have some reasoning behind them. But I personally find Erlang more difficult to read than other languages.
  - pselbert 10y ago
    The things that have always tripped me up for Erlang are capitalized variables, lowercase modules, and bare word atoms. There certainly isn't anything wrong with those choices, but it is counter to everything I'm used to from other languages that it presents some cognitive overhead. In the end, even as somebody who cares about the look of code a lot, it doesn't matter to me. The BEAM and OTP are elegant enough to compensate for any syntax.
deleted 10y ago
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naringas 10y ago

I'm interested in Elixir, but I don't know all that much about it (yet). Could you elaborate on what you mean by "mess of gobbledegook just like Erlang"? thanks

tomphoolery 10y ago

In my opinion, Elixir is still a more expressive and readable language than Erlang, and if you want to do OTP programming it's the best we have so far. Learning more about OTP has warmed me a little to the syntax of both Elixir and Erlang, because I'm now able to understand the syntactical choices that were made in order to express what's going on under the hood more clearly. As a Rubyist, I also enjoy Elixir's similarities to Ruby, and had to get over how it looked to me for a while before I really understood why it felt so weird to write. It might be a form of Stockholm Syndrome, but these days it makes sense to me so I sort-of enjoy how it works and looks.

ShaneWilton 10y ago

I'm curious about what aspects of the syntax you consider to be unreadable. Elixir code tends to be terse (though less terse than something like Haskell), but I wouldn't call it gobbledegook. The server implementation [0], for example, is 25 lines and handles a lot behind the scenes. Those 25 lines are all you need to define a process that can leverage all of the supervision and hot code reloading benefits offered by OTP. There's a lot going on, but it's mostly just pattern matching tuples and maps, and it only takes a few hours of messing around with Erlang or Elixir before that kind of thing stops looking so scary. [0] https://github.com/sasa1977/erlangelist/blob/master/examples/buffer/lib/buffer/server.ex https://github.com/sasa1977/erlangelist/blob/master/examples...

aetherson 10y ago
Sure, like this: %__MODULE__{buffer | size: buffer.size + 1, queue: :queue.in(item, buffer.queue)} So that involves a bunch of operators that are very specialized to Elixir -- the %, the | are both very unclear in my opinion. And the __MODULE__ construction is clumsy. Or worse: {:ok, { :ets.lookup_element(buffer.ets, pull_index, 2), %__MODULE__{buffer | size: buffer.size - 1, pull_index: rem(pull_index + 1, buffer.max_size) } }} Same problem as above, plus the nested set structures that Erlang loves, but which rapidly become super difficult to decipher. Oh, and also the overloading of atoms to work like pseudo-objects.
- ShaneWilton 10y ago
  I agree that your second code example is difficult to read, but I think that is more a result of a lot of logic being inlined into one call, than it is a property of the language. % and | are going to be unclear if you're an outsider looking in on the language, but that is true for any sort of specialization. I'd be interested to know what languages you find to be readable, because I can all but guarantee that there's aspects of that language that I'd find arcane -- not because they are, but because I don't know the language. I'm not terribly interested in discussing whether a language is readable or not, because a lot of that is going to come down to subjective opinion, but at the end of the day, I find that Elixir lets me quickly write maintainable code. I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "overloading of atoms to work like pseudo-objects", do you mind elaborating?
  - aetherson 10y ago
    Probably too late to reply, but I mean things like :ets.method or :queue.whatever.
    - karmajunkie 10y ago
      What you might be missing is that modules names are just atoms, and thats how you get to erlang libraries/applications in elixir. In "MyApp.whatever" MyApp is also an atom. It's not any kind of overloading or object fakeout at all. The use of __MODULE__ just refers to the current module, and its use is quite common. It's perfectly idiomatic and straightforward to read if you've written enough erlang or elixir to recognize the syntactic elements without the translation hiccup. At this point I find Elixir code a great deal easier to read than a lot of ruby, php, or C++ code I've had to work with in the past. While it may not really be your cup of tea, you can't fairly accuse it of something that has more to go with the reader than the writer.

plainOldText 10y ago

I personally find Elixir to be a very readable, expressive and thoughtful language. I agree, Erlang not so much. Would you care to elaborate which parts you consider to be "gobbledegook"? The code supplied is just a few lines of code. I don't know how familiar are you with the language, but the magical aspect of it will quickly disappear once your learn a few OTP patterns. I personally started initially with Erlang, but when I discovered Elixir, I switched, as I found it way more pleasurable. Python and Elixir are actually the only two languages that make me happy when writing code, and I've tried quite a few of them, from C all the way to Haskell.

ShaneWilton 10y ago
> I agree, Erlang not so much. I thought the same thing once, until I actually sat down and tried to learn Erlang. It turns out that a lot of the decisions that I originally thought were asinine, actually make a lot of sense. Line terminators for example (, ; .) tend to receive a lot of flak, but they really aren't as crazy as they first seem. Commas come after normal lines of code (you can read them as and), semicolons come at the end of clauses in if or case statements (and you can read them as or), and periods mark the end of a function. It's a little more verbose than something like Javascript or Ruby, but it really isn't as confusing as critics tend to claim!
- plainOldText 10y ago
  Oh, absolutely. I'm sure the Erlang inventors weren't crazy, and most of their choices have some reasoning behind them. But I personally find Erlang more difficult to read than other languages.
- pselbert 10y ago
  The things that have always tripped me up for Erlang are capitalized variables, lowercase modules, and bare word atoms. There certainly isn't anything wrong with those choices, but it is counter to everything I'm used to from other languages that it presents some cognitive overhead. In the end, even as somebody who cares about the look of code a lot, it doesn't matter to me. The BEAM and OTP are elegant enough to compensate for any syntax.

deleted 10y ago

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