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Monads and Haskell is not a requirement to understand a functional programming language. Also, I find it hard to believe that anyone who knows N+1 programming

Monads and Haskell is not a requirement to understand a functional programming language. Also, I find it hard to believe that anyone who knows N+1 programming languages would have a hard time understanding Elixir quickly, it looks like most mainstream programming languages used today, with slightly different syntax for some things. Take a look at https://elixir-lang.org/crash-course.html https://elixir-lang.org/crash-course.html and you'll see what I mean, it's basically Ruby with some slight modifications.

arrowsmith 3y ago
As much as I love Elixir, it's really not just "basically Ruby with some slight modifications". The syntax is similar at a glance, but there are some major design differences (e.g. immutability); solving the same problem in Elixir and Ruby can require a completely different structure to your code. I wrote this blog post about what I think are the three most important differences between Elixir and Ruby: https://phoenixonrails.com/blog/elixir-for-ruby-developers-the-three-most-important-differences https://phoenixonrails.com/blog/elixir-for-ruby-developers-t... . There's definitely a learning curve, although it's not insurmountable.
- skrebbel 3y ago
  No monads though. No pure functions, no Option types, pretty much no recursion in practice. Really it’s got none of the stuff that makes some FP languages hard to learn. (Except maybe “no for loops”).
  - arrowsmith 3y ago
    That's true - Elixir is simpler to learn than, say, Haskell. All I'm saying is that it's not a trivial jump from Elixir to Ruby, despite the superficially similar syntax.
    - skrebbel 3y ago
      I don’t think eg ruby->go is a bigger jump. Learn defer, structural typing, interfaces vs learn to replace all loops with map/filter/etc + pattern matching. Feels similar, no?
GrinningFool 3y ago
> it's basically Ruby with some slight modifications. It /looks/ like Ruby in a lot of ways, but treating it like Ruby w/ modifications is a mistake that I've seen lead to a lot of really bad usage that (at best) fails to take advantage of the underlying Beam VM, and at worst [and more commonly] actively works against it.

arrowsmith 3y ago

As much as I love Elixir, it's really not just "basically Ruby with some slight modifications". The syntax is similar at a glance, but there are some major design differences (e.g. immutability); solving the same problem in Elixir and Ruby can require a completely different structure to your code. I wrote this blog post about what I think are the three most important differences between Elixir and Ruby: https://phoenixonrails.com/blog/elixir-for-ruby-developers-the-three-most-important-differences https://phoenixonrails.com/blog/elixir-for-ruby-developers-t... . There's definitely a learning curve, although it's not insurmountable.

skrebbel 3y ago
No monads though. No pure functions, no Option types, pretty much no recursion in practice. Really it’s got none of the stuff that makes some FP languages hard to learn. (Except maybe “no for loops”).
- arrowsmith 3y ago
  That's true - Elixir is simpler to learn than, say, Haskell. All I'm saying is that it's not a trivial jump from Elixir to Ruby, despite the superficially similar syntax.
  - skrebbel 3y ago
    I don’t think eg ruby->go is a bigger jump. Learn defer, structural typing, interfaces vs learn to replace all loops with map/filter/etc + pattern matching. Feels similar, no?

GrinningFool 3y ago

> it's basically Ruby with some slight modifications. It /looks/ like Ruby in a lot of ways, but treating it like Ruby w/ modifications is a mistake that I've seen lead to a lot of really bad usage that (at best) fails to take advantage of the underlying Beam VM, and at worst [and more commonly] actively works against it.