11 ms·

Elixir 1.11

381 points by nifoc 6y ago

ramchip 6y ago
It's great to see some type checking sneaking in Elixir :)
bot41 6y ago
I started to learn Elixir and Phoenix awhile ago. I liked it but stopped due to (i) there's no job opportunities near me for Elixir and I wanted to the learning/projects I do on my own to help me in interviews; and (ii) it's not a strongly typed language which I have come to learn is my favored type of language
- andy_ppp 6y ago
  I’m starting to see more and more jobs here in London, including one with live view.
- pmarreck 6y ago
  > near me You are experiencing the same global pandemic the rest of us are, right? Remote work and all that? (It’s honestly not for everyone. I prefer some physical facetime myself or I... “get disconnected”) > not a strongly-typed language While this guarantees elimination of a class of bug, pattern matching plus guards cover most of the potential bug surfaces there IMHO. I know the language creators have been considering some directions to go, there
  - joelbluminator 6y ago
    Pandemic or no pandemic, most jobs are at least local to the country. If he is from Russia it's way harder for him to get a job in a U.S / EU company. Also - if it's hard for him to get an Elixir job now (and let's assume he knows if it's hard or not and heard of the concept of remote), while Elixir is past it's peak, is it a good bet to keep going the Elixir route?
    - joelbluminator 6y ago
      Also, looking at the numbers in the UK on Linkedin: 132 Elixir jobs for the entire UK (ruby has 1941, php has 4832, java 10973). I'm not saying it's impossible but 132 mentions is not a lot. And it's not as if no one is fighting you for these Elixir jobs, quite a few people still want these jobs. Is Elixir still being chosen for new projects by startups or is it all python / go / rust ? The numbers for Elixir are very low.
      - derefr 6y ago
        People who are hiring for roles using smaller languages know that there are few people local to them who are practitioners in the language. They tend to do one of two things about that: 1. They don't even bother advertising a position in local geographical "general" job boards. (Job postings on LinkedIn cost money for every day you have them up; they're a waste of resources if you can predict with high confidence that nobody will find the role through there.) Instead, they'll advertise globally but targeted to the language's community (i.e. language-specific job boards, forums and chat groups, newsletters, etc.) This is where the people using the language are looking, too, anyway, because they also know that there are too few local opportunities for it to make sense to invest the time in checking local job-boards for a job matching their skillset. 2. They don't bother hiring for the language. Instead, they hire for "experience with [relevant language paradigms]" and "experience with any of [similar, more-popular languages]" and then expect the new hire to learn the language on the job. My personal job-criterion for hiring Elixir devs is "a polyglot in several different language paradigms, fluent in at least one functional language." I find that that filter actually predicts better whether they'll be a good Elixir dev, than actual experience using Elixir does. ----- As an aside, there's also the fact that languages like Erlang/Elixir (or the MLs, or the Lisps, or Prolog, or...) tend not to be languages used for everything in a company, but instead tend to be languages used for the secret sauce core component of a company. A lot of the time, companies don't talk about using these languages, even though they do, because they consider them a competitive advantage over their rivals in whatever niche they occupy. Heroku is an obvious example: much of their architecture was written in Erlang [nearly everything at first], but they never advertised that fact once in any official capacity. Likewise, HFT firms never mention they're using ML or Prolog, but many do, because trading bots are often just souped-up expert systems. The only time you find these things out, is when having a beer with ex-engineers from those companies.
  - bot41 6y ago
    That is a good point and I am working remotely in my current job until next year at least. I think my time and effort is best put into trying to get a job in the tech stack I know at the moment rather than trying to switch.
- peruvian 6y ago
  I had this issue too, even before the pandemic. In fact back when I was looking even if there were Elixir job postings they often strongly preferred a Ruby/Rails background on top of that, which I didn't have. I just decided it's one of my hobby languages. If a job comes out of it in the future, that's awesome.
  - strzibny 6y ago
    I will give an opposite experience. I was hired with zero previous knowledge of Elixir or functional stack (well, except Haskell course at uni). The other dev actually came from C# background (I came from Ruby). 100% remote.
    - bot41 6y ago
      How did you find the job and how did the interview go?
- freedomben 6y ago
  Elixir/Phoenix is my hobby. I build personal projects on it. I was able to find a few jobs, but not a ton (this was a couple years ago). The jobs that are out there all wanted experience but obviously that's hard to do with a new platform. I got an interview with one company that I thought understood that I only had a few months experience as a hobbyist (which means I'll be doing a lot of Googling even for common APIs) but they rejected me. At this point my experience with professional Elixir has not been positive. I love the language but I'll probably just stay a hobbyist, at least until things change.
  - FeistyOtter 6y ago
    It is an interesting (but probably very subjective) observation that the majority of companies with a rare or esoteric stacks hire only experienced devs with the stack and refuse to train them themselves. Maybe it is because they are smaller and lack resources. And on the contrary, in my experience, large companies based on common languages like Java, C#, JS and the like dedicate huge resources for training their junior programmers from the grounds up.
    - ativzzz 6y ago
      Which ultimately makes those rare and esoteric stacks less likely to survive because experienced engineers who don't have experience with those particular stacks have no ways of getting those jobs without experience in those jobs. Companies like Jane Street make more sense. They use ocaml but they don't expect you to have any ocaml experience coming in, but they also have plenty of resources for training and hiring talented engineers.
      - joelbluminator 6y ago
        Think about young startups that aren't sure when the next round of cash will come and their personnel stay there on average 2, 2.5 years. Spending 6-8 months on getting a new developer productive with a new language is super expensive for such a company. In fact, employing juniors in general is pretty risky for such a company.
- samgranieri 6y ago
  I recommend starting up a side project to learn a language. That's how I learned Ruby, and consequently Ruby on Rails 15 years ago.
  - cuddlecake 6y ago
    What's a good side project, if one is not really interested in the problem space of the side project? I.e. I mostly just program for money, so how do I motivate myself to do a side project I'm not interested in, just to learn the language? I wonder if I could ask my employer for two weeks of time to "rewrite" parts of our backend in Elixir, just so I could scratch that itch, without any of the consequences of it actually reaching production. Like a programming language sabbatical
    - mrjoelkemp 6y ago
      I find building a simple game (like tictactoe) in Phoenix Liveview to be a good learning project. You can layer on multiplayer using Phoenix pubsub once you have a working one player version. You can also then layer on structs, typespecs, or any other idiomatic features of the language that you need practice in.
    - datashaman 6y ago
      Exercism is great for learning a language. https://exercism.io/tracks/elixir https://exercism.io/tracks/elixir
  - bot41 6y ago
    I really think that is the only way. My issue is that I want to make the most of my free time in order to help me in interviews. I think picking up Elixir/Phoenix wouldn't help me since there are less jobs and I would have to take focus away from a stack that I have a better chance of getting a job in.
- bcrosby95 6y ago
  Phoenix is a fine web framework. But with the shared-nothing approach of designing webapps, they tend to be pretty simple to both isolate and make concurrent regardless of your stack. I think BEAM languages are much more interesting for backends where a shared-nothing approach isn't an acceptable solution, and I feel like that's where its power and uniqueness over other languages really shines.
- sergiotapia 6y ago
  We're hiring for Elixir engineers, and specifically a Senior Elixir developer: https://www.joinpapa.com/careers/6IexFa6irc36vwF6aKXkE6/seniorbackendengineer-miami,fl-remote https://www.joinpapa.com/careers/6IexFa6irc36vwF6aKXkE6/seni...
ianleeclark 6y ago
> IEx also has been improved to show the documentation for Erlang modules directly from your Elixir terminal. This is a really nice change for those of us who straddle both languages. I've done a fair bit of work with both ets and the crypto module and having to jump into and out of firefox felt at odds with the rest of the development experience.
- andy_ppp 6y ago
  Also the online Erlang docs are arguably even more utilitarian than iex docs output...
  - elcritch 6y ago
    That made me laugh, but it's true. The Erlang docs are like 1980's brutalist architecture. Functional but utilitarian. But it's great to have the Erlang docs in IEx; it's my favorite docs interface.
    - ch4s3 6y ago
      Yeah, IEx's h/1 function is great. I just wish it had some sort of built in search for when you don't really know exactly the Module and function you're looking for.
    - vincnetas 6y ago
      "Functional BUT utilitarian" ? You mean "Functional AND utilitarian" because for me these both are very welcome features.
      - lostcolony 6y ago
        The conjunction here is purely to taste, since utilitarian implies functional, as well as not particularly attractive; both are correct (as would just 'utilitarian', since it's not a loss of information, implying as it does the functional aspect).
ch4s3 6y ago
I know support for the map.field syntax in guards is a bit controversial, but I'm really excited about it!
- pmarreck 6y ago
  I actually already built that functionality in the past using macros so it might be similar
josevalim 6y ago
The official release announcement can be found here: https://elixir-lang.org/blog/2020/10/06/elixir-v1-11-0-released/ https://elixir-lang.org/blog/2020/10/06/elixir-v1-11-0-relea... It provides more context, links, and other improvements over the CHANGELOG. I am not sure if it is possible to update the link in the post though.
- scns 6y ago
  @dang can update it
- dang 6y ago
  Ok, we changed to that from https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir/releases/tag/v1.11.0 https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir/releases/tag/v1.11.0. Thanks!
  - josevalim 6y ago
    Thank you!
anonymousDan 6y ago
Are there any plans for JIT compilation for elixir/Erlang and if not why not?
- jetpackjoe 6y ago
  Yes! See https://twitter.com/josevalim/status/1304399735445426176 https://twitter.com/josevalim/status/1304399735445426176
- thepratt 6y ago
  https://github.com/erlang/otp/pull/2745 https://github.com/erlang/otp/pull/2745 may be what you're after.
- lawik 6y ago
  Slated for release in OTP 24 I think. This covers the spproach they use: https://youtu.be/lM7UV95Rpyo https://youtu.be/lM7UV95Rpyo Most interesting take-aways from benchmarks are some cases where RabbitMQ processes 30-50% more messages per second. And where a native Erlang JSON library beat NIF C library in some specific tests. The PR link covers this info.
dcolkitt 6y ago
Question from someone who's never tried Erlang/Elixir but is interested. If you're starting a greenfield project in 2020, is there any reason to use baseline Erlang instead of Elixir? I get the impression that Elixir is a strict improvement (besides legacy compatibility). But this is a very very uninformed impression.
- napsterbr 6y ago
  Personally I see no reason to start a new project with Erlang unless you really enjoy its syntax (perhaps for someone who has a solid background in Prolog?). With Elixir you get everything in Erlang plus a lot of extremely powerful libraries/frameworks (e.g. Ecto and Phoenix), macros, a friendlier syntax etc.
- randito 6y ago
  If you're interested in Erlang/Elixir, you might want to watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvBT4XBdoUE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvBT4XBdoUE (GOTO 2019 • The Soul of Erlang and Elixir • Saša Jurić) It shows off the power of the BEAM VM -- and kind of makes you stand back and go "whoa.. how do they do that?"
- zach_garwood 6y ago
  I think it's mostly a matter of taste which syntax you prefer. Where Elixir has the most advantage, in my opinion, is Mix, the language's build tool / project config / task runner. You use the command line tool to compile your project, run your tests, and any other user-defined task you'd like. And you use the Mix module to define your project's dependencies, environments, and build targets in Elixir code. It's a really nice all-in-one Swiss Army knife compared to the cobbled-together build processes from disparate tools found in other languages.
- ihumanable 6y ago
  I work in Elixir most of the time but can read and write Erlang reasonably well, here's my two cents. Elixir's syntax was inspired by ruby and so if you've used ruby or look at ruby code and think, "yea, I get what's going on here" then you will likely find working with Elixir's syntax preferable to Erlang. Erlang's syntax was based off of Prolog and so it will be less familiar, unless you have done a bunch of Prolog programming. Elixir layers on a bunch of things that are very nice to have at a language level, the ability to rebind names is probably the one that most impacts code. In Erlang you can't rebind a variable, so Erlang code ends up either using lots of very small functions of having variables like `n` `n2` `n3`. It's not that you can't write good, clean, easy to reason about code in Erlang, but if you are coming from a language with mutability and variable rebinding, it's a bit of a culture shock. I find that Elixir hits a nice medium ground to allow you to wrap your head around immutable data structures, functional programming, actor model, OTP without ALSO having to climb the hills of unfamiliar syntax and some limitations (like variable rebinding) that aren't strictly necessary. From a tooling standpoint, I find Elixir to be a bit more pleasant than Erlang. Mix (build tool) is great, ExUnit (unit testing) is great, ExDocs (docs generation) is great, Hex (package management) is great. The Elixir community has somehow stayed pretty unified when it comes to tools and for the most part they work really well. From an interoperability standpoint, you really don't leave anything behind choosing to use Elixir over Erlang. Erlang dependencies work just fine, and the interop is so easy, here, I'll give you an example. Want to use an Erlang module directly from your Elixir code, here's an example of how to use the timer module. :timer.seconds(1) That's it, that's the interop, you don't have to import anything weird, you don't have to fence off your code, you don't have to juggle types from Elixir types into Erlang types and back again. Want your Erlang interop to look more like elixir, two lines of code. alias :timer, as: Timer Timer.seconds(1) Overall the Erlang and Elixir communities are friends (and Gleam, LFE, and all the other BEAM Languages). It's a very positive community all working to build great functionality on top of the really cool piece of tech that is the BEAM VM.
tres 6y ago
Runtime configuration is my favorite new feature of this release. Dancing around runtime vs compile time configuration seemed like it was one of the "harder" parts of dropping into Elixir. edit: grammar
- strzibny 6y ago
  Same. Same.
auraham 6y ago
I love Elixir. I would like to see more improvements in iex, something like ipython for python.
- lytedev 6y ago
  I'm very interested in hearing about some specifics!
princevegeta89 6y ago
All I could only ask for today is just a better ide support. I don't like vscode; even though the plugin for intellij has improved, there is still a lot to be desired
- pselbert 6y ago
  The IDE type tooling is getting better all the time thanks to Elixir-LS. There was a 0.6 release a couple of days ago with a ton of improvements [0]. Better auto-completion triggers and Ecto completion come to mind as huge quality of life improvements. 0: https://github.com/elixir-lsp/elixir-ls/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md#v060-3-october-2020 https://github.com/elixir-lsp/elixir-ls/blob/master/CHANGELO...
  - princevegeta89 6y ago
    Is this supported in IntelliJ ?
    - pselbert 6y ago
      No idea. It is the foundation of VSCode and most of the other plugin systems powered by the language server standard.
- gmassman 6y ago
  I'm a bit biased as someone who's already used to nvim, but the coc-elixir support is fantastic. Takes a bit of configuration but once you've got the language server set up it's better than any IDE.
bostonvaulter2 6y ago
I'm really excited for the runtime configuration updates and the compile time tracking updates.
areichert 6y ago
Pretty stoked for this. I started learning Elixir a few months ago [0] and it's been a great balance of fun + practical. Way easier to get up and running compared some other FP languages I've dabbled with in the past :P Also shameless plug: we're currently working on an open source messaging product called Papercups [1] if anyone is looking for an Elixir project to hack on! [0] https://www.papercups.io/blog/elixir-noob https://www.papercups.io/blog/elixir-noob [1] https://github.com/papercups-io/papercups https://github.com/papercups-io/papercups
- princevegeta89 6y ago
  I know you from your previous ShowHN, good luck, your product looks great!
  - areichert 6y ago
    Thank you :)
svnpenn 6y ago
Does anyone know a fast mirror for Erlang? Every time I try to download its very slow: https://github.com/erlang/eep/issues/12 https://github.com/erlang/eep/issues/12
dmix 6y ago
Reading through the details of this release, I have to say this sort of functional backend/compiler/performance, etc style releases make the whole product as a whole better in the long run. This tick/tock approach to releases is what every software project should strive for. Too many consumer focused products become obsessively new-feature driven development [1], often to have new things to announce, or to appease the loudest whining customers/industry critics of the day (operating systems like MacOS, Windows, and mobile platforms are the classic examples). Much like in the design world where saying "no" often and pushing back against fanciness is critical, the same in software for pushing towards general structural improvement iterations is key to making good software. [1] Ignoring of course the bug-fixing-driven development cycle that many projects get trapped in.
- risyachka 6y ago
  I would argue that operating systems have been feature-driven. For years now at best you can see 1-2 minor features a year. Mostly its just some design tweaks.
- 1_player 6y ago
  IIRC some time ago José said Elixir is stable, and there's no v2.0 coming any time soon. There will be updates, but it's just polishing and refining a stable product. The language might be still be over-hyped, but the language implementation itself has reached the plateau of productivity. Which is great, I know of some language ecosystems where true productivity is never, ever reached.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
_zachs 6y ago
I'm stuck between learning Clojure and Elixir (for a backend that will power a web app). The one thing pulling me towards Clojure is ClojureScript, and the fact that I'd be able to write a frontend and backend with the same syntax.

381 points by nifoc 6y ago

It's great to see some type checking sneaking in Elixir :)

I started to learn Elixir and Phoenix awhile ago. I liked it but stopped due to (i) there's no job opportunities near me for Elixir and I wanted to the learning/projects I do on my own to help me in interviews; and (ii) it's not a strongly typed language which I have come to learn is my favored type of language

andy_ppp 6y ago
I’m starting to see more and more jobs here in London, including one with live view.
pmarreck 6y ago
> near me You are experiencing the same global pandemic the rest of us are, right? Remote work and all that? (It’s honestly not for everyone. I prefer some physical facetime myself or I... “get disconnected”) > not a strongly-typed language While this guarantees elimination of a class of bug, pattern matching plus guards cover most of the potential bug surfaces there IMHO. I know the language creators have been considering some directions to go, there
- joelbluminator 6y ago
  Pandemic or no pandemic, most jobs are at least local to the country. If he is from Russia it's way harder for him to get a job in a U.S / EU company. Also - if it's hard for him to get an Elixir job now (and let's assume he knows if it's hard or not and heard of the concept of remote), while Elixir is past it's peak, is it a good bet to keep going the Elixir route?
  - joelbluminator 6y ago
    Also, looking at the numbers in the UK on Linkedin: 132 Elixir jobs for the entire UK (ruby has 1941, php has 4832, java 10973). I'm not saying it's impossible but 132 mentions is not a lot. And it's not as if no one is fighting you for these Elixir jobs, quite a few people still want these jobs. Is Elixir still being chosen for new projects by startups or is it all python / go / rust ? The numbers for Elixir are very low.
    - derefr 6y ago
      People who are hiring for roles using smaller languages know that there are few people local to them who are practitioners in the language. They tend to do one of two things about that: 1. They don't even bother advertising a position in local geographical "general" job boards. (Job postings on LinkedIn cost money for every day you have them up; they're a waste of resources if you can predict with high confidence that nobody will find the role through there.) Instead, they'll advertise globally but targeted to the language's community (i.e. language-specific job boards, forums and chat groups, newsletters, etc.) This is where the people using the language are looking, too, anyway, because they also know that there are too few local opportunities for it to make sense to invest the time in checking local job-boards for a job matching their skillset. 2. They don't bother hiring for the language. Instead, they hire for "experience with [relevant language paradigms]" and "experience with any of [similar, more-popular languages]" and then expect the new hire to learn the language on the job. My personal job-criterion for hiring Elixir devs is "a polyglot in several different language paradigms, fluent in at least one functional language." I find that that filter actually predicts better whether they'll be a good Elixir dev, than actual experience using Elixir does. ----- As an aside, there's also the fact that languages like Erlang/Elixir (or the MLs, or the Lisps, or Prolog, or...) tend not to be languages used for everything in a company, but instead tend to be languages used for the secret sauce core component of a company. A lot of the time, companies don't talk about using these languages, even though they do, because they consider them a competitive advantage over their rivals in whatever niche they occupy. Heroku is an obvious example: much of their architecture was written in Erlang [nearly everything at first], but they never advertised that fact once in any official capacity. Likewise, HFT firms never mention they're using ML or Prolog, but many do, because trading bots are often just souped-up expert systems. The only time you find these things out, is when having a beer with ex-engineers from those companies.
- bot41 6y ago
  That is a good point and I am working remotely in my current job until next year at least. I think my time and effort is best put into trying to get a job in the tech stack I know at the moment rather than trying to switch.
peruvian 6y ago
I had this issue too, even before the pandemic. In fact back when I was looking even if there were Elixir job postings they often strongly preferred a Ruby/Rails background on top of that, which I didn't have. I just decided it's one of my hobby languages. If a job comes out of it in the future, that's awesome.
- strzibny 6y ago
  I will give an opposite experience. I was hired with zero previous knowledge of Elixir or functional stack (well, except Haskell course at uni). The other dev actually came from C# background (I came from Ruby). 100% remote.
  - bot41 6y ago
    How did you find the job and how did the interview go?
freedomben 6y ago
Elixir/Phoenix is my hobby. I build personal projects on it. I was able to find a few jobs, but not a ton (this was a couple years ago). The jobs that are out there all wanted experience but obviously that's hard to do with a new platform. I got an interview with one company that I thought understood that I only had a few months experience as a hobbyist (which means I'll be doing a lot of Googling even for common APIs) but they rejected me. At this point my experience with professional Elixir has not been positive. I love the language but I'll probably just stay a hobbyist, at least until things change.
- FeistyOtter 6y ago
  It is an interesting (but probably very subjective) observation that the majority of companies with a rare or esoteric stacks hire only experienced devs with the stack and refuse to train them themselves. Maybe it is because they are smaller and lack resources. And on the contrary, in my experience, large companies based on common languages like Java, C#, JS and the like dedicate huge resources for training their junior programmers from the grounds up.
  - ativzzz 6y ago
    Which ultimately makes those rare and esoteric stacks less likely to survive because experienced engineers who don't have experience with those particular stacks have no ways of getting those jobs without experience in those jobs. Companies like Jane Street make more sense. They use ocaml but they don't expect you to have any ocaml experience coming in, but they also have plenty of resources for training and hiring talented engineers.
    - joelbluminator 6y ago
      Think about young startups that aren't sure when the next round of cash will come and their personnel stay there on average 2, 2.5 years. Spending 6-8 months on getting a new developer productive with a new language is super expensive for such a company. In fact, employing juniors in general is pretty risky for such a company.
samgranieri 6y ago
I recommend starting up a side project to learn a language. That's how I learned Ruby, and consequently Ruby on Rails 15 years ago.
- cuddlecake 6y ago
  What's a good side project, if one is not really interested in the problem space of the side project? I.e. I mostly just program for money, so how do I motivate myself to do a side project I'm not interested in, just to learn the language? I wonder if I could ask my employer for two weeks of time to "rewrite" parts of our backend in Elixir, just so I could scratch that itch, without any of the consequences of it actually reaching production. Like a programming language sabbatical
  - mrjoelkemp 6y ago
    I find building a simple game (like tictactoe) in Phoenix Liveview to be a good learning project. You can layer on multiplayer using Phoenix pubsub once you have a working one player version. You can also then layer on structs, typespecs, or any other idiomatic features of the language that you need practice in.
  - datashaman 6y ago
    Exercism is great for learning a language. https://exercism.io/tracks/elixir https://exercism.io/tracks/elixir
- bot41 6y ago
  I really think that is the only way. My issue is that I want to make the most of my free time in order to help me in interviews. I think picking up Elixir/Phoenix wouldn't help me since there are less jobs and I would have to take focus away from a stack that I have a better chance of getting a job in.
bcrosby95 6y ago
Phoenix is a fine web framework. But with the shared-nothing approach of designing webapps, they tend to be pretty simple to both isolate and make concurrent regardless of your stack. I think BEAM languages are much more interesting for backends where a shared-nothing approach isn't an acceptable solution, and I feel like that's where its power and uniqueness over other languages really shines.
sergiotapia 6y ago
We're hiring for Elixir engineers, and specifically a Senior Elixir developer: https://www.joinpapa.com/careers/6IexFa6irc36vwF6aKXkE6/seniorbackendengineer-miami,fl-remote https://www.joinpapa.com/careers/6IexFa6irc36vwF6aKXkE6/seni...

ianleeclark 6y ago

> IEx also has been improved to show the documentation for Erlang modules directly from your Elixir terminal. This is a really nice change for those of us who straddle both languages. I've done a fair bit of work with both ets and the crypto module and having to jump into and out of firefox felt at odds with the rest of the development experience.

andy_ppp 6y ago
Also the online Erlang docs are arguably even more utilitarian than iex docs output...
- elcritch 6y ago
  That made me laugh, but it's true. The Erlang docs are like 1980's brutalist architecture. Functional but utilitarian. But it's great to have the Erlang docs in IEx; it's my favorite docs interface.
  - ch4s3 6y ago
    Yeah, IEx's h/1 function is great. I just wish it had some sort of built in search for when you don't really know exactly the Module and function you're looking for.
  - vincnetas 6y ago
    "Functional BUT utilitarian" ? You mean "Functional AND utilitarian" because for me these both are very welcome features.
    - lostcolony 6y ago
      The conjunction here is purely to taste, since utilitarian implies functional, as well as not particularly attractive; both are correct (as would just 'utilitarian', since it's not a loss of information, implying as it does the functional aspect).

ch4s3 6y ago

I know support for the map.field syntax in guards is a bit controversial, but I'm really excited about it!

pmarreck 6y ago
I actually already built that functionality in the past using macros so it might be similar

josevalim 6y ago

The official release announcement can be found here: https://elixir-lang.org/blog/2020/10/06/elixir-v1-11-0-released/ https://elixir-lang.org/blog/2020/10/06/elixir-v1-11-0-relea... It provides more context, links, and other improvements over the CHANGELOG. I am not sure if it is possible to update the link in the post though.

scns 6y ago
@dang can update it
dang 6y ago
Ok, we changed to that from https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir/releases/tag/v1.11.0 https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir/releases/tag/v1.11.0. Thanks!
- josevalim 6y ago
  Thank you!

anonymousDan 6y ago

Are there any plans for JIT compilation for elixir/Erlang and if not why not?

jetpackjoe 6y ago
Yes! See https://twitter.com/josevalim/status/1304399735445426176 https://twitter.com/josevalim/status/1304399735445426176
thepratt 6y ago
https://github.com/erlang/otp/pull/2745 https://github.com/erlang/otp/pull/2745 may be what you're after.
lawik 6y ago
Slated for release in OTP 24 I think. This covers the spproach they use: https://youtu.be/lM7UV95Rpyo https://youtu.be/lM7UV95Rpyo Most interesting take-aways from benchmarks are some cases where RabbitMQ processes 30-50% more messages per second. And where a native Erlang JSON library beat NIF C library in some specific tests. The PR link covers this info.

dcolkitt 6y ago

Question from someone who's never tried Erlang/Elixir but is interested. If you're starting a greenfield project in 2020, is there any reason to use baseline Erlang instead of Elixir? I get the impression that Elixir is a strict improvement (besides legacy compatibility). But this is a very very uninformed impression.

napsterbr 6y ago
Personally I see no reason to start a new project with Erlang unless you really enjoy its syntax (perhaps for someone who has a solid background in Prolog?). With Elixir you get everything in Erlang plus a lot of extremely powerful libraries/frameworks (e.g. Ecto and Phoenix), macros, a friendlier syntax etc.
randito 6y ago
If you're interested in Erlang/Elixir, you might want to watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvBT4XBdoUE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvBT4XBdoUE (GOTO 2019 • The Soul of Erlang and Elixir • Saša Jurić) It shows off the power of the BEAM VM -- and kind of makes you stand back and go "whoa.. how do they do that?"
zach_garwood 6y ago
I think it's mostly a matter of taste which syntax you prefer. Where Elixir has the most advantage, in my opinion, is Mix, the language's build tool / project config / task runner. You use the command line tool to compile your project, run your tests, and any other user-defined task you'd like. And you use the Mix module to define your project's dependencies, environments, and build targets in Elixir code. It's a really nice all-in-one Swiss Army knife compared to the cobbled-together build processes from disparate tools found in other languages.
ihumanable 6y ago
I work in Elixir most of the time but can read and write Erlang reasonably well, here's my two cents. Elixir's syntax was inspired by ruby and so if you've used ruby or look at ruby code and think, "yea, I get what's going on here" then you will likely find working with Elixir's syntax preferable to Erlang. Erlang's syntax was based off of Prolog and so it will be less familiar, unless you have done a bunch of Prolog programming. Elixir layers on a bunch of things that are very nice to have at a language level, the ability to rebind names is probably the one that most impacts code. In Erlang you can't rebind a variable, so Erlang code ends up either using lots of very small functions of having variables like `n` `n2` `n3`. It's not that you can't write good, clean, easy to reason about code in Erlang, but if you are coming from a language with mutability and variable rebinding, it's a bit of a culture shock. I find that Elixir hits a nice medium ground to allow you to wrap your head around immutable data structures, functional programming, actor model, OTP without ALSO having to climb the hills of unfamiliar syntax and some limitations (like variable rebinding) that aren't strictly necessary. From a tooling standpoint, I find Elixir to be a bit more pleasant than Erlang. Mix (build tool) is great, ExUnit (unit testing) is great, ExDocs (docs generation) is great, Hex (package management) is great. The Elixir community has somehow stayed pretty unified when it comes to tools and for the most part they work really well. From an interoperability standpoint, you really don't leave anything behind choosing to use Elixir over Erlang. Erlang dependencies work just fine, and the interop is so easy, here, I'll give you an example. Want to use an Erlang module directly from your Elixir code, here's an example of how to use the timer module. :timer.seconds(1) That's it, that's the interop, you don't have to import anything weird, you don't have to fence off your code, you don't have to juggle types from Elixir types into Erlang types and back again. Want your Erlang interop to look more like elixir, two lines of code. alias :timer, as: Timer Timer.seconds(1) Overall the Erlang and Elixir communities are friends (and Gleam, LFE, and all the other BEAM Languages). It's a very positive community all working to build great functionality on top of the really cool piece of tech that is the BEAM VM.

tres 6y ago

Runtime configuration is my favorite new feature of this release. Dancing around runtime vs compile time configuration seemed like it was one of the "harder" parts of dropping into Elixir. edit: grammar

strzibny 6y ago
Same. Same.

auraham 6y ago

I love Elixir. I would like to see more improvements in iex, something like ipython for python.

lytedev 6y ago
I'm very interested in hearing about some specifics!

princevegeta89 6y ago

All I could only ask for today is just a better ide support. I don't like vscode; even though the plugin for intellij has improved, there is still a lot to be desired

pselbert 6y ago
The IDE type tooling is getting better all the time thanks to Elixir-LS. There was a 0.6 release a couple of days ago with a ton of improvements [0]. Better auto-completion triggers and Ecto completion come to mind as huge quality of life improvements. 0: https://github.com/elixir-lsp/elixir-ls/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md#v060-3-october-2020 https://github.com/elixir-lsp/elixir-ls/blob/master/CHANGELO...
- princevegeta89 6y ago
  Is this supported in IntelliJ ?
  - pselbert 6y ago
    No idea. It is the foundation of VSCode and most of the other plugin systems powered by the language server standard.
gmassman 6y ago
I'm a bit biased as someone who's already used to nvim, but the coc-elixir support is fantastic. Takes a bit of configuration but once you've got the language server set up it's better than any IDE.

bostonvaulter2 6y ago

I'm really excited for the runtime configuration updates and the compile time tracking updates.

areichert 6y ago

Pretty stoked for this. I started learning Elixir a few months ago [0] and it's been a great balance of fun + practical. Way easier to get up and running compared some other FP languages I've dabbled with in the past :P Also shameless plug: we're currently working on an open source messaging product called Papercups [1] if anyone is looking for an Elixir project to hack on! [0] https://www.papercups.io/blog/elixir-noob https://www.papercups.io/blog/elixir-noob [1] https://github.com/papercups-io/papercups https://github.com/papercups-io/papercups

princevegeta89 6y ago
I know you from your previous ShowHN, good luck, your product looks great!
- areichert 6y ago
  Thank you :)

svnpenn 6y ago

Does anyone know a fast mirror for Erlang? Every time I try to download its very slow: https://github.com/erlang/eep/issues/12 https://github.com/erlang/eep/issues/12

dmix 6y ago

Reading through the details of this release, I have to say this sort of functional backend/compiler/performance, etc style releases make the whole product as a whole better in the long run. This tick/tock approach to releases is what every software project should strive for. Too many consumer focused products become obsessively new-feature driven development [1], often to have new things to announce, or to appease the loudest whining customers/industry critics of the day (operating systems like MacOS, Windows, and mobile platforms are the classic examples). Much like in the design world where saying "no" often and pushing back against fanciness is critical, the same in software for pushing towards general structural improvement iterations is key to making good software. [1] Ignoring of course the bug-fixing-driven development cycle that many projects get trapped in.

risyachka 6y ago
I would argue that operating systems have been feature-driven. For years now at best you can see 1-2 minor features a year. Mostly its just some design tweaks.
1_player 6y ago
IIRC some time ago José said Elixir is stable, and there's no v2.0 coming any time soon. There will be updates, but it's just polishing and refining a stable product. The language might be still be over-hyped, but the language implementation itself has reached the plateau of productivity. Which is great, I know of some language ecosystems where true productivity is never, ever reached.

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_zachs 6y ago

I'm stuck between learning Clojure and Elixir (for a backend that will power a web app). The one thing pulling me towards Clojure is ClojureScript, and the fact that I'd be able to write a frontend and backend with the same syntax.