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I personally believe that Elixir is an excellent 'gateway' functional programming language because it is dynamically typed. Learning OCaml and especially Haske

I personally believe that Elixir is an excellent 'gateway' functional programming language because it is dynamically typed. Learning OCaml and especially Haskell (I've done some of both) requires understanding a complex type system and learning how to encode what you want in it. On top of that you have to learn to code in the 'functional' way - representing your data, pure code, recursion (or reduces), higher order functions etc. When you write Elixir you eliminate most of the type system stuff, and you just have to learn to code in a functional way. There is surprisingly little 'language' to learn - functions, tuples, lists, maps, modules and that's about it. There is then the OTP (processes and supervisors) side of it, but that's separate (and if you're writing a web backend in Phoenix, mostly ignorable). We're just (hopefully) wrapping up a 9 month project with a team of about 8, none of which had written much Elixir before the start (a background of mostly C). It has been a very smooth process, and definitely the right choice of language.

pdimitar 6y ago
I sorely lack Elixir's easy entry experience while I am getting better and better at Rust. :( And I'll look for ways to use it at my $dayjob. Rust is an excellent language but I feel that for some pieces of our stack Rust is kind of a bazooka in a scenario where a 9mm pistol would do.
- rkangel 6y ago
  I could see an argument where Rust is performant and low level enough that you can use it at the bottom of the stack, and has good enough abstractions that it's productive to use higher in the stack. There are certainly benefits to using one language for everything, but this logic reasoning relies on you having a team that is very familiar with it, and having your bits of tooling and libraries worked out for your setup.
  - pdimitar 6y ago
    Yep, exactly. Lower-level languages however also give you much more foot-guns. These days my ideal app is written in Elixir for almost everything due to the insane parallelisation and fault-tolerance that it offers (and the copy semantics that make shared memory bugs impossible) with Rust sprinkled at the critically important-to-be-fast places -- like working with sqlite3 for example. All of that could be achieved with Rust or any other language really. But it requires tons of tooling, CI/CD jobs, Git hooks, static analyzers, linters, formatters etc. And a good chunk of all that doesn't even exist for many languages. So I prefer to make my own blend that has the important advantages at the right places.

pdimitar 6y ago

I sorely lack Elixir's easy entry experience while I am getting better and better at Rust. :( And I'll look for ways to use it at my $dayjob. Rust is an excellent language but I feel that for some pieces of our stack Rust is kind of a bazooka in a scenario where a 9mm pistol would do.

rkangel 6y ago
I could see an argument where Rust is performant and low level enough that you can use it at the bottom of the stack, and has good enough abstractions that it's productive to use higher in the stack. There are certainly benefits to using one language for everything, but this logic reasoning relies on you having a team that is very familiar with it, and having your bits of tooling and libraries worked out for your setup.
- pdimitar 6y ago
  Yep, exactly. Lower-level languages however also give you much more foot-guns. These days my ideal app is written in Elixir for almost everything due to the insane parallelisation and fault-tolerance that it offers (and the copy semantics that make shared memory bugs impossible) with Rust sprinkled at the critically important-to-be-fast places -- like working with sqlite3 for example. All of that could be achieved with Rust or any other language really. But it requires tons of tooling, CI/CD jobs, Git hooks, static analyzers, linters, formatters etc. And a good chunk of all that doesn't even exist for many languages. So I prefer to make my own blend that has the important advantages at the right places.