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I think if you replace Elixir with Erlang, the beginning of the hype cycle argument goes away since now we are talking about rock solid software backend that is

by gjkood 10y ago

I think if you replace Elixir with Erlang, the beginning of the hype cycle argument goes away since now we are talking about rock solid software backend that is decades old (from the 1980s) and powering a large chunk of the telephone switches in the world. If I am not mistaken Elixir is primarily a front end that generates code for the Erlang VM (BEAM) supported by the Erlang OTP backend. Having said that the questions remains, why doesn't Erlang get the same hype? I am hazarding a guess that a majority of developers still work in the imperative style and switching to the functional side takes a bit of relearning in the way you think.

devmunchies 10y ago
Elixir has a much more "standard" syntax so its naturally gonna have a lower barrier to entry.
- true_religion 10y ago
  It's not really the syntax. Elixir's semantics are simply better than Erlang. Erlang accumulated a lot of worts, but it never really got rid of them. I don't think Syntax matters all that much. Smalltalk's syntax is pretty odd, but its regular and simple to explain/understand, so people quickly come to like it. Smalltalk's VM's though are a huge barrier to entry. Erlang is the reverse: great VM... great architectural decisions... great libraries.... questionable language semantics.
kitsune_ 10y ago
I don't understand this argument. Elixir is still its own distinct thing, the fact that it compiles to BEAM byte code is secondary in assessing whether it is currently in a hype cycle or not. Just like Clojure, Eta, Scala, jErlang or the myriad of other languages that run on top of the JVM can be hyped independently of the JVM or Java. Erlang did get the same amount of hype, probably multiple times in the past 20 years. So did many, if not most reasonably well-known languages, programming paradigms, architectural solutions, databases, frameworks and so on. I do not make any judgement about the merits or maturity of Elixir itself. Elixir is perfectly fine. As developers we should have a healthy dose of skepticism when it comes to blog posts that claim 10x speed improvements with technology X. Was it just the rewrite? Does your use case match mine? And so on... In short: Everything is a trade off, and there is no silver-bullet.

by gjkood 10y ago

devmunchies 10y ago

Elixir has a much more "standard" syntax so its naturally gonna have a lower barrier to entry.

true_religion 10y ago
It's not really the syntax. Elixir's semantics are simply better than Erlang. Erlang accumulated a lot of worts, but it never really got rid of them. I don't think Syntax matters all that much. Smalltalk's syntax is pretty odd, but its regular and simple to explain/understand, so people quickly come to like it. Smalltalk's VM's though are a huge barrier to entry. Erlang is the reverse: great VM... great architectural decisions... great libraries.... questionable language semantics.

kitsune_ 10y ago

I don't understand this argument. Elixir is still its own distinct thing, the fact that it compiles to BEAM byte code is secondary in assessing whether it is currently in a hype cycle or not. Just like Clojure, Eta, Scala, jErlang or the myriad of other languages that run on top of the JVM can be hyped independently of the JVM or Java. Erlang did get the same amount of hype, probably multiple times in the past 20 years. So did many, if not most reasonably well-known languages, programming paradigms, architectural solutions, databases, frameworks and so on. I do not make any judgement about the merits or maturity of Elixir itself. Elixir is perfectly fine. As developers we should have a healthy dose of skepticism when it comes to blog posts that claim 10x speed improvements with technology X. Was it just the rewrite? Does your use case match mine? And so on... In short: Everything is a trade off, and there is no silver-bullet.