3 ms·

Sometimes I wonder what kind of a world we'd be living in if places like Flatiron School and the various bootcamps taught Elixir instead of Ruby. Also, "lorry"

Sometimes I wonder what kind of a world we'd be living in if places like Flatiron School and the various bootcamps taught Elixir instead of Ruby. Also, "lorry" is such a great word, too bad there's no use for it in the US.

sosodev 2y ago
My guess is that world would be indistinguishable from ours. There is nothing wrong with Ruby.
- rekoros 2y ago
  Elixir wouldn't exist without Ruby, so I have nothing but gratitude. My question angles more toward learning functional programming first, and I doubt it'll ever happen at bootcamps (though - my understanding is that's exactly what happens at Berkeley/MIT with Lisp/Scheme in CS101 (I'd argue with decent results)) - so it's very much a hypothetical.
  - ativzzz 2y ago
    > I'd argue with decent results Is it decent results because of functional programming? Or decent results because those colleges select for the people who generally have the most intellectual aptitude and you could have them write Cobol on tape for CS101 and they'd still be great
    - rekoros 2y ago
      I don’t know, but I doubt that they’re so smart that they’re the only ones who “deserve”, somehow, to be blessed with functional CS101. I heard that it’s a special form of torture, since those CS programs must be hard, but I don’t really buy it.
      - HeyLaughingBoy 2y ago
        Well, it's Open Courseware, so you can find out for yourself if you're so inclined.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
adamtaylor_13 2y ago
I’m genuinely curious what you mean. Elixir is a different paradigm but I’ve yet to understand how Elixir is inherently “better” than Ruby.
- rekoros 2y ago
  Oh, I don't think there's a universal "better" when it comes to such things, and I'm not implying that one is universally better than the other. I discovered the Elixir runtime (BEAM) a few years before Elixir was created (we were using the Erlang language then), and for my specific use cases, when I understood the principles of concurrency, error handling, and introspection in BEAM, it caused quite an epiphany. It was also scary, because I had to unlearn pretty much everything I knew :) From a purely esthetic perspective, I find that pattern matching and tail recursion-enabled programming patterns are more concise, easier to comprehend, and are less error-prone than those offered by the more mainstream languages that don't have those features. In my experience - and I'm not a particularly great programmer, so it was welcome - I found that I produced code with signifcantly fewer dumb errors when I no longer had access to imperative programming paradigms and was forced to come up with more "functional" solutions. I don't believe that functional programming is inherently more complex than what we learn in school/college/work with conventional languages. My question really stems from the idea of learning functional first - and I do wonder what that would look like.
  - sosodev 2y ago
    That's a fine perspective but the way you worded your comment was evocative of the typical "X is objectively better than Y" tech comment. Are you aware that Ruby includes a lot of functional programming features (including pattern matching)?
    - rekoros 2y ago
      I think it’s great that functional programming is making its way into traditional imperative languages - even JavaScript (I recently came across https://gcanti.github.io/fp-ts/ https://gcanti.github.io/fp-ts/ as a pretty extreme example) Elixir/Erlang has function-level pattern matching, which I really like. I’ve yet to see it anywhere else, though my understanding is it came from Prolog.
chefandy 2y ago
Existing Elixir shops probably aren't looking for fresh bootcamp grad level coders, and those grads' skillsets don't hold any weight until there's enough to start affecting new project decisions, which probably wouldn't have happened. Even Ruby is a stretch as a one-trick skillset for new developers without CS degrees, and it was quite popular well before bootcamps were: that's why they taught it. I mean, I love me some Elixir, but the result is that most of the schools would have closed within months and the graduates would probably not have gained much from them.

sosodev 2y ago

My guess is that world would be indistinguishable from ours. There is nothing wrong with Ruby.

rekoros 2y ago
Elixir wouldn't exist without Ruby, so I have nothing but gratitude. My question angles more toward learning functional programming first, and I doubt it'll ever happen at bootcamps (though - my understanding is that's exactly what happens at Berkeley/MIT with Lisp/Scheme in CS101 (I'd argue with decent results)) - so it's very much a hypothetical.
- ativzzz 2y ago
  > I'd argue with decent results Is it decent results because of functional programming? Or decent results because those colleges select for the people who generally have the most intellectual aptitude and you could have them write Cobol on tape for CS101 and they'd still be great
  - rekoros 2y ago
    I don’t know, but I doubt that they’re so smart that they’re the only ones who “deserve”, somehow, to be blessed with functional CS101. I heard that it’s a special form of torture, since those CS programs must be hard, but I don’t really buy it.
    - HeyLaughingBoy 2y ago
      Well, it's Open Courseware, so you can find out for yourself if you're so inclined.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

adamtaylor_13 2y ago

I’m genuinely curious what you mean. Elixir is a different paradigm but I’ve yet to understand how Elixir is inherently “better” than Ruby.

rekoros 2y ago
Oh, I don't think there's a universal "better" when it comes to such things, and I'm not implying that one is universally better than the other. I discovered the Elixir runtime (BEAM) a few years before Elixir was created (we were using the Erlang language then), and for my specific use cases, when I understood the principles of concurrency, error handling, and introspection in BEAM, it caused quite an epiphany. It was also scary, because I had to unlearn pretty much everything I knew :) From a purely esthetic perspective, I find that pattern matching and tail recursion-enabled programming patterns are more concise, easier to comprehend, and are less error-prone than those offered by the more mainstream languages that don't have those features. In my experience - and I'm not a particularly great programmer, so it was welcome - I found that I produced code with signifcantly fewer dumb errors when I no longer had access to imperative programming paradigms and was forced to come up with more "functional" solutions. I don't believe that functional programming is inherently more complex than what we learn in school/college/work with conventional languages. My question really stems from the idea of learning functional first - and I do wonder what that would look like.
- sosodev 2y ago
  That's a fine perspective but the way you worded your comment was evocative of the typical "X is objectively better than Y" tech comment. Are you aware that Ruby includes a lot of functional programming features (including pattern matching)?
  - rekoros 2y ago
    I think it’s great that functional programming is making its way into traditional imperative languages - even JavaScript (I recently came across https://gcanti.github.io/fp-ts/ https://gcanti.github.io/fp-ts/ as a pretty extreme example) Elixir/Erlang has function-level pattern matching, which I really like. I’ve yet to see it anywhere else, though my understanding is it came from Prolog.

chefandy 2y ago

Existing Elixir shops probably aren't looking for fresh bootcamp grad level coders, and those grads' skillsets don't hold any weight until there's enough to start affecting new project decisions, which probably wouldn't have happened. Even Ruby is a stretch as a one-trick skillset for new developers without CS degrees, and it was quite popular well before bootcamps were: that's why they taught it. I mean, I love me some Elixir, but the result is that most of the schools would have closed within months and the graduates would probably not have gained much from them.