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Great comparison. I'd love to see this expands to more languages. A quick question, you talk about Elixir yet mention Erlang a lot. Is the choice of Elixir ove

by didibus 10y ago

Great comparison. I'd love to see this expands to more languages. A quick question, you talk about Elixir yet mention Erlang a lot. Is the choice of Elixir over Erlang purely syntactic preferences? Or is Elixir just an all around win above Erlang?

klibertp 10y ago
I'd say Elixir is the sharper tool. It cuts better - and I don't mean the syntax, but the macros - which can be a bad thing if you slice yourself by mistake. Erlang, with its small and hard to extend syntax, its libraries, frameworks, and conventions, is geared towards stability. Erlang is meant for creating reliable systems, which will be maintained for decades. Erlang is the most conservative (in the sense Steve Yegge's post) of dynamic languages out there: it's verbose, predictable, boring, consistent, reliable and focused solely on fault-tolerance (ie. long term stability). Elixir tries to be a less conservative Erlang, but also good enough scripting and general purpose programming language. It's not a drastic change in capabilities, but rather re-focusing the language a bit to be more friendly to abstraction and extension. Elixir delivers on its promises magnificently: for my latest project, where I need the most expressive language I can get, I considered Elixir among such languages as Smalltalk, Io, Common Lisp, and Lua. So it's more than just syntactic preferences, but the two languages remain very closely related. Elixir functions are Erlang functions, you can use Elixir modules from Erlang just fine and so on. Erlang is a simpler language, so my advice is to start learning Elixir and you'll learn Erlang when reading articles about its libraries that you want to use.
pdimitar 10y ago
I am not by any means an expert. I started using Elixir several months ago then gradually made my way to Erlang's standard library. In short: Elixir is more expressive and easier to write. There are a few syntax/stdlib peculiarities but frankly, every language has them. I'd only classify Go and Java as languages with slightly less WTFs in their stdlib compared to Elixir. I'd give 2-3% of Elixir's stdlib functions a slightly bad color. Perfectly acceptable IMO. Erlang is probably just fine for people who are used to it but for me Elixir was much easier to pick up. Also it started gaining additional functionality which uses OTP's primitives. Check `GenStage` and `Flow` for higher level complex multi-process scenarios, they are really next-level stuff and they help a lot.

by didibus 10y ago

klibertp 10y ago

I'd say Elixir is the sharper tool. It cuts better - and I don't mean the syntax, but the macros - which can be a bad thing if you slice yourself by mistake. Erlang, with its small and hard to extend syntax, its libraries, frameworks, and conventions, is geared towards stability. Erlang is meant for creating reliable systems, which will be maintained for decades. Erlang is the most conservative (in the sense Steve Yegge's post) of dynamic languages out there: it's verbose, predictable, boring, consistent, reliable and focused solely on fault-tolerance (ie. long term stability). Elixir tries to be a less conservative Erlang, but also good enough scripting and general purpose programming language. It's not a drastic change in capabilities, but rather re-focusing the language a bit to be more friendly to abstraction and extension. Elixir delivers on its promises magnificently: for my latest project, where I need the most expressive language I can get, I considered Elixir among such languages as Smalltalk, Io, Common Lisp, and Lua. So it's more than just syntactic preferences, but the two languages remain very closely related. Elixir functions are Erlang functions, you can use Elixir modules from Erlang just fine and so on. Erlang is a simpler language, so my advice is to start learning Elixir and you'll learn Erlang when reading articles about its libraries that you want to use.

pdimitar 10y ago

I am not by any means an expert. I started using Elixir several months ago then gradually made my way to Erlang's standard library. In short: Elixir is more expressive and easier to write. There are a few syntax/stdlib peculiarities but frankly, every language has them. I'd only classify Go and Java as languages with slightly less WTFs in their stdlib compared to Elixir. I'd give 2-3% of Elixir's stdlib functions a slightly bad color. Perfectly acceptable IMO. Erlang is probably just fine for people who are used to it but for me Elixir was much easier to pick up. Also it started gaining additional functionality which uses OTP's primitives. Check `GenStage` and `Flow` for higher level complex multi-process scenarios, they are really next-level stuff and they help a lot.