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Working with Elixir on a daily basis is mostly a pleasure, but those "ArgumentError" errors have been super annoying. Looks like Elixir 1.12 will take full adv

Working with Elixir on a daily basis is mostly a pleasure, but those "ArgumentError" errors have been super annoying. Looks like Elixir 1.12 will take full advantage of EEP 54: https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir/releases/tag/v1.12.0-rc.0 https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir/releases/tag/v1.12.0-r...

losvedir 5y ago
Awesome, thanks for linking that! I was wondering how these improvements would flow through to Elixir. Looks like we get the JIT performance improvements for free. And unrelated to the Erlang/OTP changes, Elixir 1.12 looks awesome. Totally small, but such an unexpected little quality of life improvement, Kernel.then/2 for pipelines, looks great. I love the core team's focus on the UX of the language.
- sgrytoyr 5y ago
  Totally agree. I have just a few remaining complaints about the language at this point, and Kernel.tap/2 and Kernel.then/2 will solve two of them. When Jose mentioned a few years back that Elixir the language was more or less "done" or at least stable, and that they would focus on ergonomics and UX going forward, I remember getting a little worried. But I’ve found myself agreeing more and more - there’s not much I miss in the language itself, and projects like Nx, LiveView and LiveBook have shown that it’s an excellent foundation to build very powerful and modern stuff on top of.
  - akoutmos 5y ago
    As someone who has been programming with Elixir for my day job for the past few years, I find this aspect of the language to be super pragmatic and productive. It's a nice feeling to not have to chase new language features and syntax and focus more on the problem at hand. In addition, I've never felt limited by the language given that the underlying constructs are so powerful (message passing, immutability, pattern matching, etc). Glad that Jose made the decision that he did.
    - mindfulmore 5y ago
      Curious, do you use typespecs and dialyzer? If so, how do you find it? Elixir checks pretty much every box I'd want in a language, but after dealing with nil in Ruby for years and having fun with TypeScript... I'm feeling more drawn to working with type systems.
      - lawik 5y ago
        Answering from similar experience. I personally use them both, dialyzer as part of the Elixir Language Server and typespecs when I feel something needs more clarity and definition. Depending on what itches your types scratch for you it might be enough, might not. I've never wanted more type system in my Elixir personally.
      - dnautics 5y ago
        I find working with nil in Elixir to be quite reasonable. One way in which elixir is different is that you have different operators for when it must be boolean, and nil is not tolerated for those operators (and vs &&). This coupled with the convention of using ? at the end of functions which emit boolean makes things easier. The one thing I wish is that people stopped writing boolean functions with is_ in front (that is supposed to be only for guards, but not everyone follows that convention).
      - cuddlecake 5y ago
        If you want type systems, you can probably work with Gleam, in the future, I imagine there could be great interop where you can just drop in a .gleam file in your elixir code base with zero hassle attached, and have parts of your code base that are completely type safe, and let Elixir handle all the risks of IO and other effects. But, this might just be my wishful thinking.
        mindfulmore 5y ago
        I've kept an eye on Gleam. Essentially all of the programming I do is based around the web so I'm kind hoping a web framework shows up at some point.
  - jerf 5y ago
    "When Jose mentioned a few years back that Elixir the language was more or less "done" or at least stable, and that they would focus on ergonomics and UX going forward" That's awesome to hear. I think there's a lot of language communities in the 10+ year range (and look, that's right where Elixir is) could stand to have that recognition. I'm getting kind of saddened by the number of languages I see that are good languages that proceed to festoon themselves with so many new features that they become quite difficult to use.

losvedir 5y ago

Awesome, thanks for linking that! I was wondering how these improvements would flow through to Elixir. Looks like we get the JIT performance improvements for free. And unrelated to the Erlang/OTP changes, Elixir 1.12 looks awesome. Totally small, but such an unexpected little quality of life improvement, Kernel.then/2 for pipelines, looks great. I love the core team's focus on the UX of the language.

sgrytoyr 5y ago
Totally agree. I have just a few remaining complaints about the language at this point, and Kernel.tap/2 and Kernel.then/2 will solve two of them. When Jose mentioned a few years back that Elixir the language was more or less "done" or at least stable, and that they would focus on ergonomics and UX going forward, I remember getting a little worried. But I’ve found myself agreeing more and more - there’s not much I miss in the language itself, and projects like Nx, LiveView and LiveBook have shown that it’s an excellent foundation to build very powerful and modern stuff on top of.
- akoutmos 5y ago
  As someone who has been programming with Elixir for my day job for the past few years, I find this aspect of the language to be super pragmatic and productive. It's a nice feeling to not have to chase new language features and syntax and focus more on the problem at hand. In addition, I've never felt limited by the language given that the underlying constructs are so powerful (message passing, immutability, pattern matching, etc). Glad that Jose made the decision that he did.
  - mindfulmore 5y ago
    Curious, do you use typespecs and dialyzer? If so, how do you find it? Elixir checks pretty much every box I'd want in a language, but after dealing with nil in Ruby for years and having fun with TypeScript... I'm feeling more drawn to working with type systems.
    - lawik 5y ago
      Answering from similar experience. I personally use them both, dialyzer as part of the Elixir Language Server and typespecs when I feel something needs more clarity and definition. Depending on what itches your types scratch for you it might be enough, might not. I've never wanted more type system in my Elixir personally.
    - dnautics 5y ago
      I find working with nil in Elixir to be quite reasonable. One way in which elixir is different is that you have different operators for when it must be boolean, and nil is not tolerated for those operators (and vs &&). This coupled with the convention of using ? at the end of functions which emit boolean makes things easier. The one thing I wish is that people stopped writing boolean functions with is_ in front (that is supposed to be only for guards, but not everyone follows that convention).
    - cuddlecake 5y ago
      If you want type systems, you can probably work with Gleam, in the future, I imagine there could be great interop where you can just drop in a .gleam file in your elixir code base with zero hassle attached, and have parts of your code base that are completely type safe, and let Elixir handle all the risks of IO and other effects. But, this might just be my wishful thinking.
      - mindfulmore 5y ago
        I've kept an eye on Gleam. Essentially all of the programming I do is based around the web so I'm kind hoping a web framework shows up at some point.
- jerf 5y ago
  "When Jose mentioned a few years back that Elixir the language was more or less "done" or at least stable, and that they would focus on ergonomics and UX going forward" That's awesome to hear. I think there's a lot of language communities in the 10+ year range (and look, that's right where Elixir is) could stand to have that recognition. I'm getting kind of saddened by the number of languages I see that are good languages that proceed to festoon themselves with so many new features that they become quite difficult to use.