3 ms·

I don't get this Elixir as the natural progression for Rubyists. OO/mutable Ruby and functional/immutable Elixir are worlds apart beyond the superficial syntax

• sethrin 8y ago
  Ruby does lend itself to writing a lot of functional code. One can write Ruby so that it looks very similar to Bash or other Algol-derivatives, but it's also possible to write code which avoids side effects, mutable state, or variables in general.
  • cutler 8y ago
    Genuine immutability, ie. the deep copy variant, isn't that easy to work with in Ruby. At least not without a significant performance hit and who wants to add a performance hit on top of Ruby's baseline performance?
• sho 8y ago
  > worlds apart beyond the superficial syntax similarities I never understood this argument. That "superficial" syntax is what I have to stare at, reading and writing, for 8 hours a day. That I actually enjoy doing so is therefore hugely important to me. I mean, you can make the same argument against Elixir itself, and I've seen it done - Erlang old-timers arguing against the necessity of these "superficial" syntax improvements. Suffice to say that I profoundly disagree.
  • cutler 8y ago
    I didn't say the syntax is superficial - I'm an Elixir fan, in fact. I meant the similarities with Ruby syntax are superficial.