8 ms·

Why Elixir (2014)

124 points by arrowsmith 3y ago

dragosmocrii 3y ago
Elixir is amazing. Had a stab at it back in 2018, then shifted to work with other traditional langs/stacks, but Elixir has always stayed in the back of my head teasing me. It's an elegant language, that you can see that the authors have put effort in keeping it lean, powerful, expressive. Phoenix (which is the goto web framework) may seem magical in the beginning, but once you dive in you realize that there is no magic, it's all there explicitly in modules (well maybe for macros which do feel magical). What I was missing back in 2018 is IDE support which was iffy. I wonder how that changed recently, if anyone who knows cares to share?
- doawoo 3y ago
  VSCode support for the language is better than ever, outside of VSCode too! NextLS and ElixirLS provide the editor integration you’re probably looking for :)
- tres 3y ago
  Not sure what you're looking for in IDE support... If you're a Jetbrains addict, there's this IDE extension which has worked well for me: https://github.com/KronicDeth/intellij-elixir https://github.com/KronicDeth/intellij-elixir
gv83 3y ago
“Why not Elixir” is a more interesting question and I suggest you go ask it to engineering managers of polyglot organizations. They will usually bring you the super low nps from not-elixir-only devs and the resignation letters from elixir “talents” that are asked to do non elixir stuff.
- nesarkvechnep 3y ago
  Is this a problem with Elixir? Have you seen a Java dev using a different technology? They usually haven't even heard of anything besides Java.
- toast0 3y ago
  > super low nps Net Promoter Score? > resignation letters from elixir “talents” that are asked to do non elixir stuff. I mean, I would prefer to be working in Erlang, but I took a Rusty job recently. OTOH, if I was working in Erlang for you, and you made me switch to something else, I would most likely not be happy and if my job is changing, I may as well change jobs, or at least consider it. Leaving behind simple concurrency and hot loading means it takes a lot longer for me to get things done, and it's one thing to work at a job where things take forever, but it's even worse to go from being able to get things done quickly to slowly.
  - gv83 3y ago
    yes, Net Promoter Score about the second part of your answer; my (probably very rare) opinion is that our job is not to "work in erlang" or "work in rust", is "solve problems/automate stuff". If I ask you to work in Foo instead of Erlang, it's the same job. I highly doubt that your job is slow because Go and fast because Rust, it's slow because process/idiots in other teams/idiots in your team/idiots as your "agile coach" etc. I understand wanting to have a good career, but language is never the obstacle to a successful career. Also, this implicit bias that people who know exotic languages are better is completely false.
    - toast0 3y ago
      > I highly doubt that your job is slow because Go and fast because Rust, it's slow because process/idiots in other teams/idiots in your team/idiots as your "agile coach" etc. Team dynamics are of course, very important. But my job is slow absolutely because I don't have hot loading. Sure, yes, I could build hotloading in Rust, but it would be difficult and the resulting code would look be a lot less idiomatic than my Rust code is already; which makes it harder to do. Because I don't have hotloading and I work with a system where long lived tasks stay on a single server, I can't change the code for existing tasks in progress. Instead, I have to set up a new cluster and let new tasks start on the new cluster, and then I have to later come in and cleanup the old cluster. This is a lot more work than pushing and loading new code on the existing cluster. And it means I need to wait longer to see the results. And tasks have a limited lifetime. Because of the operational cost of doing an update, it's not worthwhile to do small incremental updates, instead I have to batch things into substantial updates and keep track of more things. At my previous job, we would regularly have tcp connected clients connected for weeks or months with the latest server code via hotloading. I can't do that now. Either I let clients stay connected to old code servers, or I force them to reconnect and lose their state. (Yeah, maybe there's a way to force them to reconnect and transfer their state; that's not easy though) It's like making a mechanic work without powertools. Yes, you can do everything, but without the proper tools to do my job, everything takes longer. A mechanic trained without access to or knowledge of power tools might not notice the difference, of course. And power tools offer the ability to do both good work and bad work much faster. Edit to add: Re the job is to solve problems regardless of language; I don't necessarily disagree, and I'm definitely willing to pitch in and debug nearby systems that are outside of my preferred language, or even write code in a language I despise if it's the best way to solve a problem. But if the majority of my job is in languages that make it harder for me to work, and that's not something that was clear before I took the job, and especially if it's a new thing, it's going to make me look for something else. I'd expect that just as much for someone who feels Erlang makes them more productive as for someone who feels Rust or Java or C or Erlang or Fortran or Lisp or Python or whatever language they love. There's a lot to like about a lot of languages, even if they don't appeal to me.
- doawoo 3y ago
  Funny, this happened to me specifically. We were an all Elixir (and legacy Ruby) shop with some wildly smart engineers. Got acquired and jammed into another larger org. Got pressured to switch to Java and Go without considering that maybe our system was designed around the way OTP apps work. Fast forward a few years and lots of us left, and found successful Elixir jobs where we were much happier elsewhere, making much more interesting technology. Sounds more like an org problem to me.
- mekoka 3y ago
  You've successfully been dealing with a sand problem with shovels. Then the new boss tells you about these amazing forks that they've used in the past to address any and all issues and wants you to start using them too. Quitting is not you being difficult. It's just opting out of a bad developer experience. Contrary to popular belief, you're entitled to also be happy as a professional programmer.
  - neonsunset 3y ago
    Which is why I would quit if someone tried to pry high throughput .NET-based microservices from my hands to replace them with something like Elixir. (A similar story has happened at Walmart when their architects did not understand F# and instituted a Java rewrite of an acquired company)
- icedchai 3y ago
  This often happens regardless of tech. The old school Unix guy that does everything in C... The C# person who hates Java... The Ruby guy that won't do Python... The backend developer that despises Javascript... on and on. Some people compromise, some don't.
doawoo 3y ago
Not a lot of technology I have work with every day “sparks joy”. But the Elixir language is one that’s usually an exception! I really encourage people to take a look at it even if you don’t end up using it right away- the OTP actor pattern is elegant yet powerful and extremely fun to prototype with.
mal-2 3y ago
I like a lot of things about Elixir but I struggled with what felt like clumsy IDE capabilities. Stuff like 'go to definition' that I use all the time in other languages didn't work right. Lack of strong types makes autocomplete problematic. I've started to mess around with Gleam hoping that it spans this gap because I want to like this ecosystem.
zelphirkalt 3y ago
I recently used Elixir for Advent of Code 2023. It is elegant in many places, at least from what I have explored during puzzle solving. However, to me it does not reach the elegance of Scheme or Lisp and I switched back to Guile while solving more puzzles. Due to its not as simple syntax, naming choices are more limited than in many Lispy languages. Also the way anonymous functions are written did not appeal to me especially that much and how they must be written when being passed to other function and how to reference functions in the same module sometimes requiring to still write the name of the module and all that is not that intuitive.
- arrowsmith 3y ago
  > how to reference functions in the same module sometimes requiring to still write the name of the module Not sure what you mean here. If the function is in the same module then you should be able to refer to it without including the module name. Can you give some example code to show what you mean?
  - zelphirkalt 3y ago
    I don't know exactly where it happened, but here [1] is a typical AoC code using Elixir. At some point I got so annoyed by Elixir telling me it does not find the functions of the very same module, that I simply defaulted to always writing the module name. [1]: https://codeberg.org/ZelphirKaltstahl/advent-of-code-2023/src/branch/main/elixir/day_04/lib/part-01.ex https://codeberg.org/ZelphirKaltstahl/advent-of-code-2023/sr... Edit: Ah yes, I remember it happening in |> pipes a lot.
    - arrowsmith 3y ago
      I still don't get it. I downloaded your code and stripped `Part01.` from all the function calls and it worked fine with no warnings. What's the problem? By the way, these two lines are redundant: alias FileHandling, as: FileHandling alias ListUtils The first line is redundant because `alias X, as: Y` makes module X available with the name Y - so if X and Y are the same then it doesn't achieve anything. And the second line is redundant because `alias X.Y.Z` with no `as` makes module `X.Y.Z` available with the abbreviated name `Z`. But if the original module name contains no dots then then there's nothing to abbreviate.
retrofrost 3y ago
I'm fascinated by Elixir, but more so for using to do neural network experiments with more unique topologies, training methods, and activation functions. Being able to spin every neuron out into a process just seems too damn elegant for doing work with spiking neural networks. Will it be as fast as the python stacks? Probably not, but not being constrained to the implicit assumptions in a lot of those libraries will be worth a lot. Plus, there's already good neural network and genetic algorithm libraries for Elixir. I really think this langauge is gonna go places.
dbbk 3y ago
I see so much effusive praise for Elixir that I feel like something must have gone really wrong with our codebase, because build times from scratch are horrible (10 minutes or so), and I frequently have problems with the incremental build when switching between branches which force me to do a clean build. Coming from a Node and PHP background makes me really appreciate the lack of compile step.
- onelesd 3y ago
  Here's a nice series of articles if you haven't seen it before, which can help you to reduce your compilation times: https://medium.com/multiverse-tech/how-to-speed-up-your-elixir-compile-times-part-1-understanding-elixir-compilation-64d44a32ec6e https://medium.com/multiverse-tech/how-to-speed-up-your-elix...
- sb8244 3y ago
  How many .ex files in code base?
dzonga 3y ago
Elixir is nice, only if there was a robust job market for it
sph 3y ago
From the author of this post, here's one of the best demos of Elixir, Erlang and modern distributed computing in general: "The Soul of Erlang and Elixir • Saša Jurić • GOTO 2019" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvBT4XBdoUE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvBT4XBdoUE When you feel sufficiently amazed by this demo, I also recommend the Elixir in Action book, by this same author, to get started with this incredible ecosystem and paradigm. --- It's hard to imagine a better platform than Erlang's for writing distributed and networked systems of any kind. I fell in love with Elixir in 2016 and have been using it full time since, first adopting as CTO in my previous company, now powering my new solo business. It's such a good language, with great community and stewardship, running on a rock solid platform that's so advanced compared to most popular languages today. Erlang was created 38 years ago, and it's good to see the ideas of Armstrong, Virding and Williams to be vindicated today. They simply were too far ahead of their time.
- arrowsmith 3y ago
  I'm working through Elixir in Action now - it's fantastic. I could have saved a lot of time and effort if I'd read it years ago.
- cproctor 3y ago
  A great talk, but that cameraperson got a workout!
- jefc1111 3y ago
  I read Elixir in Action which was a great intro, but it was Concurrent Data Processing in Elixir [1] that really made the penny drop for me. I have only finished one Elixir app. It was a lot fun and the app has proven rock solid. For me it felt a bit like using microservices but with lots of the footguns and ops overhead removed. I would love to use it for more than a hobby project. [1] https://pragprog.com/titles/sgdpelixir/concurrent-data-processing-in-elixir/ https://pragprog.com/titles/sgdpelixir/concurrent-data-proce...
- cgopalan 3y ago
  Thanks for the talk link, it completely kept me engrossed and was a pleasure to watch! Addendum question: what is the state of database drivers for Elixir? Does it have mature libraries for Postgres for eg? I imagine if it's targeting web development, it will need those.

Why Elixir (2014)

124 points by arrowsmith 3y ago

Elixir is amazing. Had a stab at it back in 2018, then shifted to work with other traditional langs/stacks, but Elixir has always stayed in the back of my head teasing me. It's an elegant language, that you can see that the authors have put effort in keeping it lean, powerful, expressive. Phoenix (which is the goto web framework) may seem magical in the beginning, but once you dive in you realize that there is no magic, it's all there explicitly in modules (well maybe for macros which do feel magical). What I was missing back in 2018 is IDE support which was iffy. I wonder how that changed recently, if anyone who knows cares to share?

doawoo 3y ago
VSCode support for the language is better than ever, outside of VSCode too! NextLS and ElixirLS provide the editor integration you’re probably looking for :)
tres 3y ago
Not sure what you're looking for in IDE support... If you're a Jetbrains addict, there's this IDE extension which has worked well for me: https://github.com/KronicDeth/intellij-elixir https://github.com/KronicDeth/intellij-elixir

gv83 3y ago

“Why not Elixir” is a more interesting question and I suggest you go ask it to engineering managers of polyglot organizations. They will usually bring you the super low nps from not-elixir-only devs and the resignation letters from elixir “talents” that are asked to do non elixir stuff.

nesarkvechnep 3y ago
Is this a problem with Elixir? Have you seen a Java dev using a different technology? They usually haven't even heard of anything besides Java.
toast0 3y ago
> super low nps Net Promoter Score? > resignation letters from elixir “talents” that are asked to do non elixir stuff. I mean, I would prefer to be working in Erlang, but I took a Rusty job recently. OTOH, if I was working in Erlang for you, and you made me switch to something else, I would most likely not be happy and if my job is changing, I may as well change jobs, or at least consider it. Leaving behind simple concurrency and hot loading means it takes a lot longer for me to get things done, and it's one thing to work at a job where things take forever, but it's even worse to go from being able to get things done quickly to slowly.
- gv83 3y ago
  yes, Net Promoter Score about the second part of your answer; my (probably very rare) opinion is that our job is not to "work in erlang" or "work in rust", is "solve problems/automate stuff". If I ask you to work in Foo instead of Erlang, it's the same job. I highly doubt that your job is slow because Go and fast because Rust, it's slow because process/idiots in other teams/idiots in your team/idiots as your "agile coach" etc. I understand wanting to have a good career, but language is never the obstacle to a successful career. Also, this implicit bias that people who know exotic languages are better is completely false.
  - toast0 3y ago
    > I highly doubt that your job is slow because Go and fast because Rust, it's slow because process/idiots in other teams/idiots in your team/idiots as your "agile coach" etc. Team dynamics are of course, very important. But my job is slow absolutely because I don't have hot loading. Sure, yes, I could build hotloading in Rust, but it would be difficult and the resulting code would look be a lot less idiomatic than my Rust code is already; which makes it harder to do. Because I don't have hotloading and I work with a system where long lived tasks stay on a single server, I can't change the code for existing tasks in progress. Instead, I have to set up a new cluster and let new tasks start on the new cluster, and then I have to later come in and cleanup the old cluster. This is a lot more work than pushing and loading new code on the existing cluster. And it means I need to wait longer to see the results. And tasks have a limited lifetime. Because of the operational cost of doing an update, it's not worthwhile to do small incremental updates, instead I have to batch things into substantial updates and keep track of more things. At my previous job, we would regularly have tcp connected clients connected for weeks or months with the latest server code via hotloading. I can't do that now. Either I let clients stay connected to old code servers, or I force them to reconnect and lose their state. (Yeah, maybe there's a way to force them to reconnect and transfer their state; that's not easy though) It's like making a mechanic work without powertools. Yes, you can do everything, but without the proper tools to do my job, everything takes longer. A mechanic trained without access to or knowledge of power tools might not notice the difference, of course. And power tools offer the ability to do both good work and bad work much faster. Edit to add: Re the job is to solve problems regardless of language; I don't necessarily disagree, and I'm definitely willing to pitch in and debug nearby systems that are outside of my preferred language, or even write code in a language I despise if it's the best way to solve a problem. But if the majority of my job is in languages that make it harder for me to work, and that's not something that was clear before I took the job, and especially if it's a new thing, it's going to make me look for something else. I'd expect that just as much for someone who feels Erlang makes them more productive as for someone who feels Rust or Java or C or Erlang or Fortran or Lisp or Python or whatever language they love. There's a lot to like about a lot of languages, even if they don't appeal to me.
doawoo 3y ago
Funny, this happened to me specifically. We were an all Elixir (and legacy Ruby) shop with some wildly smart engineers. Got acquired and jammed into another larger org. Got pressured to switch to Java and Go without considering that maybe our system was designed around the way OTP apps work. Fast forward a few years and lots of us left, and found successful Elixir jobs where we were much happier elsewhere, making much more interesting technology. Sounds more like an org problem to me.
mekoka 3y ago
You've successfully been dealing with a sand problem with shovels. Then the new boss tells you about these amazing forks that they've used in the past to address any and all issues and wants you to start using them too. Quitting is not you being difficult. It's just opting out of a bad developer experience. Contrary to popular belief, you're entitled to also be happy as a professional programmer.
- neonsunset 3y ago
  Which is why I would quit if someone tried to pry high throughput .NET-based microservices from my hands to replace them with something like Elixir. (A similar story has happened at Walmart when their architects did not understand F# and instituted a Java rewrite of an acquired company)
icedchai 3y ago
This often happens regardless of tech. The old school Unix guy that does everything in C... The C# person who hates Java... The Ruby guy that won't do Python... The backend developer that despises Javascript... on and on. Some people compromise, some don't.

doawoo 3y ago

Not a lot of technology I have work with every day “sparks joy”. But the Elixir language is one that’s usually an exception! I really encourage people to take a look at it even if you don’t end up using it right away- the OTP actor pattern is elegant yet powerful and extremely fun to prototype with.

mal-2 3y ago

I like a lot of things about Elixir but I struggled with what felt like clumsy IDE capabilities. Stuff like 'go to definition' that I use all the time in other languages didn't work right. Lack of strong types makes autocomplete problematic. I've started to mess around with Gleam hoping that it spans this gap because I want to like this ecosystem.

zelphirkalt 3y ago

I recently used Elixir for Advent of Code 2023. It is elegant in many places, at least from what I have explored during puzzle solving. However, to me it does not reach the elegance of Scheme or Lisp and I switched back to Guile while solving more puzzles. Due to its not as simple syntax, naming choices are more limited than in many Lispy languages. Also the way anonymous functions are written did not appeal to me especially that much and how they must be written when being passed to other function and how to reference functions in the same module sometimes requiring to still write the name of the module and all that is not that intuitive.

arrowsmith 3y ago
> how to reference functions in the same module sometimes requiring to still write the name of the module Not sure what you mean here. If the function is in the same module then you should be able to refer to it without including the module name. Can you give some example code to show what you mean?
- zelphirkalt 3y ago
  I don't know exactly where it happened, but here [1] is a typical AoC code using Elixir. At some point I got so annoyed by Elixir telling me it does not find the functions of the very same module, that I simply defaulted to always writing the module name. [1]: https://codeberg.org/ZelphirKaltstahl/advent-of-code-2023/src/branch/main/elixir/day_04/lib/part-01.ex https://codeberg.org/ZelphirKaltstahl/advent-of-code-2023/sr... Edit: Ah yes, I remember it happening in |> pipes a lot.
  - arrowsmith 3y ago
    I still don't get it. I downloaded your code and stripped `Part01.` from all the function calls and it worked fine with no warnings. What's the problem? By the way, these two lines are redundant: alias FileHandling, as: FileHandling alias ListUtils The first line is redundant because `alias X, as: Y` makes module X available with the name Y - so if X and Y are the same then it doesn't achieve anything. And the second line is redundant because `alias X.Y.Z` with no `as` makes module `X.Y.Z` available with the abbreviated name `Z`. But if the original module name contains no dots then then there's nothing to abbreviate.

retrofrost 3y ago

I'm fascinated by Elixir, but more so for using to do neural network experiments with more unique topologies, training methods, and activation functions. Being able to spin every neuron out into a process just seems too damn elegant for doing work with spiking neural networks. Will it be as fast as the python stacks? Probably not, but not being constrained to the implicit assumptions in a lot of those libraries will be worth a lot. Plus, there's already good neural network and genetic algorithm libraries for Elixir. I really think this langauge is gonna go places.

dbbk 3y ago

I see so much effusive praise for Elixir that I feel like something must have gone really wrong with our codebase, because build times from scratch are horrible (10 minutes or so), and I frequently have problems with the incremental build when switching between branches which force me to do a clean build. Coming from a Node and PHP background makes me really appreciate the lack of compile step.

onelesd 3y ago
Here's a nice series of articles if you haven't seen it before, which can help you to reduce your compilation times: https://medium.com/multiverse-tech/how-to-speed-up-your-elixir-compile-times-part-1-understanding-elixir-compilation-64d44a32ec6e https://medium.com/multiverse-tech/how-to-speed-up-your-elix...
sb8244 3y ago
How many .ex files in code base?

dzonga 3y ago

Elixir is nice, only if there was a robust job market for it

sph 3y ago

From the author of this post, here's one of the best demos of Elixir, Erlang and modern distributed computing in general: "The Soul of Erlang and Elixir • Saša Jurić • GOTO 2019" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvBT4XBdoUE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvBT4XBdoUE When you feel sufficiently amazed by this demo, I also recommend the Elixir in Action book, by this same author, to get started with this incredible ecosystem and paradigm. --- It's hard to imagine a better platform than Erlang's for writing distributed and networked systems of any kind. I fell in love with Elixir in 2016 and have been using it full time since, first adopting as CTO in my previous company, now powering my new solo business. It's such a good language, with great community and stewardship, running on a rock solid platform that's so advanced compared to most popular languages today. Erlang was created 38 years ago, and it's good to see the ideas of Armstrong, Virding and Williams to be vindicated today. They simply were too far ahead of their time.

arrowsmith 3y ago
I'm working through Elixir in Action now - it's fantastic. I could have saved a lot of time and effort if I'd read it years ago.
cproctor 3y ago
A great talk, but that cameraperson got a workout!
jefc1111 3y ago
I read Elixir in Action which was a great intro, but it was Concurrent Data Processing in Elixir [1] that really made the penny drop for me. I have only finished one Elixir app. It was a lot fun and the app has proven rock solid. For me it felt a bit like using microservices but with lots of the footguns and ops overhead removed. I would love to use it for more than a hobby project. [1] https://pragprog.com/titles/sgdpelixir/concurrent-data-processing-in-elixir/ https://pragprog.com/titles/sgdpelixir/concurrent-data-proce...
cgopalan 3y ago
Thanks for the talk link, it completely kept me engrossed and was a pleasure to watch! Addendum question: what is the state of database drivers for Elixir? Does it have mature libraries for Postgres for eg? I imagine if it's targeting web development, it will need those.