4 ms·

> What about people who've tried elixir and moved on? I've tried it three times and it offered me nothing Erlang didn't. Erlang, on the other hand, offers me

> What about people who've tried elixir and moved on? I've tried it three times and it offered me nothing Erlang didn't. Erlang, on the other hand, offers me much that Elixir does not. In truth, I've never met anyone who likes Elixir except people who were already Ruby programmers. What's particularly weird is your attempt to dig at the Erlang docs. They're extracted the exact same way the Elixir ones are; it's just a different CSS theme. C'mon, dude. This is very much a "coffeescript is held back by javascript" post. Yes, we know, Kotlin is really burnt by its Java roots, etc, etc. The base language always lives. The descended language rarely does.

Skinney 4y ago
> Erlang, on the other hand, offers me much that Elixir does not. Genuinly curious. Like what?
xzyyyz 4y ago
Nice to meet you. I am completely un-Ruby Pythonista, and I like Elixir a lot. I felt the same way as topic starter, and I invested couple months to make several tools Elixir-native -- the project was cancelled with the layoff. I think, this is a compromise. I strongly dislike Erlang abstraction leak, but I understand the desire to deliver the language, and iterate on cleaning up toolchain & libraries later.
srevenant 4y ago
Although I also have issue w/the Elixir docs, they tend to have more explanations in them than the Erlang ones. Marginally :) I am one who came not from Ruby, btw. My roots come from a variety of things including Smalltalk, C, C++, Perl (dare I admit), Java, Javascript and Python, among those most influential on my life (and in that order). I'm really happy w/Elixir, finally getting back to a better true object oriented system (for those who know the roots of such).
- devoutsalsa 4y ago
  Reminds me of this blog post: "The Most Object-Oriented Language" => https://blog.noredink.com/post/142689001488/the-most-object-oriented-language https://blog.noredink.com/post/142689001488/the-most-object-...
  - srevenant 4y ago
    Yep :) Anybody familiar with the roots of OO will understand how wildly Java/C++ and their ilk went off the rails. It wasn't intended as a code organizational system. It's about encapsulation of needs, actors, and sending messages back and forth.
lawn 4y ago
Macros in Elixir are very nice, so you only have to implement a few functions to get a GenServer instead of the whole protocol. Also, I'm not a Ruby developer but still found Elixir to be nicer than Erlang in small but important ways. The documentation part does hold true IMO, as the official Elixir docs are fantastic, which goes beyond just a different CSS theme.
null0ranje 4y ago
Elixir was a gateway to Erlang for me. I hadn't heard of Erlang before I started writing in Elixir, but all the discussion of why Elixir was so great revolved around Erlang and the BEAM. This lead me to Joe's distributed systems thesis and really changed how I approach writing code. The syntax takes a bit of getting used to, but I generally prefer the language. I haven't found anything that's a nice to work with for web app development in Erlang, though; I do think the tooling around Phoenix is nicely polished.
- freedomben 4y ago
  Is this the "Joe's distributed systems thesis" you refer to? https://erlang.org/download/armstrong_thesis_2003.pdf https://erlang.org/download/armstrong_thesis_2003.pdf Edit: After reading the first bit of that I'm pretty confident that is was GP was referring to. It's a really good paper and worth reading to understand why Erlang/Elixir do many of the things they do.
- taure 4y ago
  For web development for Erlang check out https://github.com/novaframework/nova https://github.com/novaframework/nova
pessimizer 4y ago
> In truth, I've never met anyone who likes Elixir except people who were already Ruby programmers. This was the purpose of the language (or if not an explicit purpose, the primary effect.) Elixir created an environment that attracted Rails people (and other people repulsed by languages that don't look like C/Algol), and behind the Rails people (Rails been long established as a safe choice but aging and scaling badly) comes management of safe companies and consultancies, and with that comes a sure way of making a living for people who love Erlang and are willing to play the Elixir game. Elixir is the same as Erlang, except with bad syntax and loaded with various ways to make your programs indecipherable, and with a cleaned up standard library and lots of nice little affordances/templates to help with processes and OTP. While Elixir (in my experience) takes a lot more debugging due to the weird javascripty syntax and pseudo-mutable variables, it's the same thing in my book (and the error messages are great.) Happy to do the one that provides the most work, and thankful that they created it.
- josevalim 4y ago
  It was not the purpose of the language nor I believe it is its primary effect. It was the immediate effect though. At last ElixirConf, I remember asking for a show of hands on people's backgrounds, and I would say Ruby was 40-50%. It is impossible to know how it applies to the community as a whole, but I think the idea that Elixir is "Erlang for Ruby" is several years dated at this point.

Skinney 4y ago

> Erlang, on the other hand, offers me much that Elixir does not. Genuinly curious. Like what?

xzyyyz 4y ago

Nice to meet you. I am completely un-Ruby Pythonista, and I like Elixir a lot. I felt the same way as topic starter, and I invested couple months to make several tools Elixir-native -- the project was cancelled with the layoff. I think, this is a compromise. I strongly dislike Erlang abstraction leak, but I understand the desire to deliver the language, and iterate on cleaning up toolchain & libraries later.

srevenant 4y ago

Although I also have issue w/the Elixir docs, they tend to have more explanations in them than the Erlang ones. Marginally :) I am one who came not from Ruby, btw. My roots come from a variety of things including Smalltalk, C, C++, Perl (dare I admit), Java, Javascript and Python, among those most influential on my life (and in that order). I'm really happy w/Elixir, finally getting back to a better true object oriented system (for those who know the roots of such).

devoutsalsa 4y ago
Reminds me of this blog post: "The Most Object-Oriented Language" => https://blog.noredink.com/post/142689001488/the-most-object-oriented-language https://blog.noredink.com/post/142689001488/the-most-object-...
- srevenant 4y ago
  Yep :) Anybody familiar with the roots of OO will understand how wildly Java/C++ and their ilk went off the rails. It wasn't intended as a code organizational system. It's about encapsulation of needs, actors, and sending messages back and forth.

lawn 4y ago

Macros in Elixir are very nice, so you only have to implement a few functions to get a GenServer instead of the whole protocol. Also, I'm not a Ruby developer but still found Elixir to be nicer than Erlang in small but important ways. The documentation part does hold true IMO, as the official Elixir docs are fantastic, which goes beyond just a different CSS theme.

null0ranje 4y ago

Elixir was a gateway to Erlang for me. I hadn't heard of Erlang before I started writing in Elixir, but all the discussion of why Elixir was so great revolved around Erlang and the BEAM. This lead me to Joe's distributed systems thesis and really changed how I approach writing code. The syntax takes a bit of getting used to, but I generally prefer the language. I haven't found anything that's a nice to work with for web app development in Erlang, though; I do think the tooling around Phoenix is nicely polished.

freedomben 4y ago
Is this the "Joe's distributed systems thesis" you refer to? https://erlang.org/download/armstrong_thesis_2003.pdf https://erlang.org/download/armstrong_thesis_2003.pdf Edit: After reading the first bit of that I'm pretty confident that is was GP was referring to. It's a really good paper and worth reading to understand why Erlang/Elixir do many of the things they do.
taure 4y ago
For web development for Erlang check out https://github.com/novaframework/nova https://github.com/novaframework/nova

pessimizer 4y ago

> In truth, I've never met anyone who likes Elixir except people who were already Ruby programmers. This was the purpose of the language (or if not an explicit purpose, the primary effect.) Elixir created an environment that attracted Rails people (and other people repulsed by languages that don't look like C/Algol), and behind the Rails people (Rails been long established as a safe choice but aging and scaling badly) comes management of safe companies and consultancies, and with that comes a sure way of making a living for people who love Erlang and are willing to play the Elixir game. Elixir is the same as Erlang, except with bad syntax and loaded with various ways to make your programs indecipherable, and with a cleaned up standard library and lots of nice little affordances/templates to help with processes and OTP. While Elixir (in my experience) takes a lot more debugging due to the weird javascripty syntax and pseudo-mutable variables, it's the same thing in my book (and the error messages are great.) Happy to do the one that provides the most work, and thankful that they created it.

josevalim 4y ago
It was not the purpose of the language nor I believe it is its primary effect. It was the immediate effect though. At last ElixirConf, I remember asking for a show of hands on people's backgrounds, and I would say Ruby was 40-50%. It is impossible to know how it applies to the community as a whole, but I think the idea that Elixir is "Erlang for Ruby" is several years dated at this point.