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Thanks for sharing. I would reach for Golang or even Rust if I was you. I work with Elixir for 9 years now (& love it) and I agree what you describe is not a g

Thanks for sharing. I would reach for Golang or even Rust if I was you. I work with Elixir for 9 years now (& love it) and I agree what you describe is not a good fit for it. Elixir is a general-purpose language in the meaning of Turing-completeness. I never once felt tempted to write a CLI tool with it though.

bryanrasmussen 1y ago
css is Turing complete, XSL-T is Turing complete, so I don't think Turing completeness is a good measure of if something is a general purpose programming language. I would argue for environmental completeness - does the language have the possibility of accessing everything in the operating system it runs in? If so, it is environmentally complete and usable as a general purpose programming language. Despite something being a general purpose programming language there are some tasks it may be better at than others. Visual Basic is a general purpose programming language but really you would most often use it for a particular subset of purposes. Elixir it seems is not good for writing a CLI.
- pdimitar 1y ago
  I was mostly clarifying what most people I've met believe is a "general-purpose language". I agree with your take on telling it like it is for the practical needs of the commercial programmers / users of a language. And again, as a guy who loves Elixir, it absolutely is not suited for writing CLI tools. Many would say it can be easily done, the community even has a few really good libraries for it as well, but the BEAM VM startup time absolutely kills its utility for tooling for me. And, as others also said, Erlang / Elixir simply excel at orchestrating a lot of runtime micro-agents, each with their own small responsibility. And they do this better than any other language I've seen. But, for one-offs / scripts / CLI tools, Golang / Rust are very difficult to dethrone. We could also add Zig / D / V and others, I suppose, but I am not familiar with them.
  - bryanrasmussen 1y ago
    yeah sorry, I've just got some trauma from people claiming that languages can be used for stuff they can't really be used for just because of Turing completeness.
    - pdimitar 1y ago
      I agree and completely sympathize. [rant] What irked me many times: people around here idolizing a certain PL they learned as kids and giving it much more credit than it ever deserved. [/rant] I completely understand the almost PTSD levels of reactions when people say "you actually can do ${obviously_difficult_thing} in ${obviusly_niche_language}!". I have the same reactions towards these statements myself. I mean sure, if you're a good enough physicist you probably can make a lounge chair out of toothpicks, toilet paper tubes, rubberbands and glue. Doesn't mean that it's sustainable or viable to do so for everyone else. It's just your hobby; go wild and have fun! Don't pretend that's how lounge chairs should be mass-produced, however. Same goes for PLs. A lot of PLs should have remained niche curiosities and research ideas -- and nothing beyond that. Sadly we both know how people are. They easily fall in love and lose all scientific objectivity. So yeah, I quite get your frustration.
dnautics 1y ago
I wrote a custom bioinformatics pipeline (CLI) in Elixir the other week. Not a terrible experience. Being able to save annotations to a binary and unpickle using term_to_binary was amazing.
- pdimitar 1y ago
  If that CLI tool integrates with a bigger ecosystem (like connect to a cluster and reuse data / services) that's already written in Elixir, then that would make it an even bigger no-brainer to use. Also hi, haven't seen you active in ElixirForum in a long time.

bryanrasmussen 1y ago

css is Turing complete, XSL-T is Turing complete, so I don't think Turing completeness is a good measure of if something is a general purpose programming language. I would argue for environmental completeness - does the language have the possibility of accessing everything in the operating system it runs in? If so, it is environmentally complete and usable as a general purpose programming language. Despite something being a general purpose programming language there are some tasks it may be better at than others. Visual Basic is a general purpose programming language but really you would most often use it for a particular subset of purposes. Elixir it seems is not good for writing a CLI.

pdimitar 1y ago
I was mostly clarifying what most people I've met believe is a "general-purpose language". I agree with your take on telling it like it is for the practical needs of the commercial programmers / users of a language. And again, as a guy who loves Elixir, it absolutely is not suited for writing CLI tools. Many would say it can be easily done, the community even has a few really good libraries for it as well, but the BEAM VM startup time absolutely kills its utility for tooling for me. And, as others also said, Erlang / Elixir simply excel at orchestrating a lot of runtime micro-agents, each with their own small responsibility. And they do this better than any other language I've seen. But, for one-offs / scripts / CLI tools, Golang / Rust are very difficult to dethrone. We could also add Zig / D / V and others, I suppose, but I am not familiar with them.
- bryanrasmussen 1y ago
  yeah sorry, I've just got some trauma from people claiming that languages can be used for stuff they can't really be used for just because of Turing completeness.
  - pdimitar 1y ago
    I agree and completely sympathize. [rant] What irked me many times: people around here idolizing a certain PL they learned as kids and giving it much more credit than it ever deserved. [/rant] I completely understand the almost PTSD levels of reactions when people say "you actually can do ${obviously_difficult_thing} in ${obviusly_niche_language}!". I have the same reactions towards these statements myself. I mean sure, if you're a good enough physicist you probably can make a lounge chair out of toothpicks, toilet paper tubes, rubberbands and glue. Doesn't mean that it's sustainable or viable to do so for everyone else. It's just your hobby; go wild and have fun! Don't pretend that's how lounge chairs should be mass-produced, however. Same goes for PLs. A lot of PLs should have remained niche curiosities and research ideas -- and nothing beyond that. Sadly we both know how people are. They easily fall in love and lose all scientific objectivity. So yeah, I quite get your frustration.

dnautics 1y ago

I wrote a custom bioinformatics pipeline (CLI) in Elixir the other week. Not a terrible experience. Being able to save annotations to a binary and unpickle using term_to_binary was amazing.

pdimitar 1y ago
If that CLI tool integrates with a bigger ecosystem (like connect to a cluster and reuse data / services) that's already written in Elixir, then that would make it an even bigger no-brainer to use. Also hi, haven't seen you active in ElixirForum in a long time.