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The community is small, but that means that a reasonable question on elixirforums (not a stateless discord/slack, pun intended) has a good chance of: 1. receiv

The community is small, but that means that a reasonable question on elixirforums (not a stateless discord/slack, pun intended) has a good chance of: 1. receiving an answer from a core contributor (valim, McCord, etc) 2. Having the answer become part of the documentation for the language or library As an aside, the elixir community has a different didactic approach to many others: the documentation in elixir is genuinely instructive (vs a descriptive reference). As an example, I've been able to download the elixir, Phoenix, and ecto docs and work on an app entirely offline, on an airplane ride, and never felt like I needed to Google anything. A common elixir answer to "where are all the blog posts" is "read the docs. No, seriously."

dopidopHN 3y ago
Thanks to pointing that out ( about the doc ) I will take your word for it and try.
el_nahual 3y ago
Too late to edit this comment, but as evidence: at time of writing this, the top comment has a very thoughtful reply by...Jose Valim (creator of the language).
sodapopcan 3y ago
> A common elixir answer to "where are all the blog posts" is "read the docs. No, seriously." This is indeed very common the forums, ha. Also common is for people to actually then go read the docs and be like, "Oh crazy, I'm not used to this!" Not to over-sell the quality of the docs, of course they aren't perfect but they really are particularly good.
- manmal 3y ago
  As a convenient side effect, GPT-4 is actually quite good at coding in Elixir. I tasked it once to find a bug in an Ecto query and it even improved the query‘s structure. I‘d been worried that, as a small-ish language, Elixir would suffer from bad LLM support, but that’s not the case.
  - enraged_camel 3y ago
    My experience has been the total opposite. It can give simple answers but makes up total nonsense for anything non-trivial. That said, with Ecto I just ask it to give me the SQL query. From there it’s pretty easy to manually write the Ecto equivalent.
    - arrowsmith 3y ago
      Are you using GPT-4 (the paid version) or GPT 3.5? 3.5 is as you describe. 4 isn't perfect but it's good enough, in my experience.
    - manmal 3y ago
      That was right after the release of GPT-4, when it was slow but good. Haven’t gotten around to much Elixir coding since, it could be that they crippled GPT-4 too much to be of use in the meantime. Oh and the chat is better for me than the API. API sometimes gives me the complete opposite of what the chat (correctly) gives me.

dopidopHN 3y ago

Thanks to pointing that out ( about the doc ) I will take your word for it and try.

el_nahual 3y ago

Too late to edit this comment, but as evidence: at time of writing this, the top comment has a very thoughtful reply by...Jose Valim (creator of the language).

sodapopcan 3y ago

> A common elixir answer to "where are all the blog posts" is "read the docs. No, seriously." This is indeed very common the forums, ha. Also common is for people to actually then go read the docs and be like, "Oh crazy, I'm not used to this!" Not to over-sell the quality of the docs, of course they aren't perfect but they really are particularly good.

manmal 3y ago
As a convenient side effect, GPT-4 is actually quite good at coding in Elixir. I tasked it once to find a bug in an Ecto query and it even improved the query‘s structure. I‘d been worried that, as a small-ish language, Elixir would suffer from bad LLM support, but that’s not the case.
- enraged_camel 3y ago
  My experience has been the total opposite. It can give simple answers but makes up total nonsense for anything non-trivial. That said, with Ecto I just ask it to give me the SQL query. From there it’s pretty easy to manually write the Ecto equivalent.
  - arrowsmith 3y ago
    Are you using GPT-4 (the paid version) or GPT 3.5? 3.5 is as you describe. 4 isn't perfect but it's good enough, in my experience.
  - manmal 3y ago
    That was right after the release of GPT-4, when it was slow but good. Haven’t gotten around to much Elixir coding since, it could be that they crippled GPT-4 too much to be of use in the meantime. Oh and the chat is better for me than the API. API sometimes gives me the complete opposite of what the chat (correctly) gives me.