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My biggest problem with Elixir is the lack of support for 3rd-party libraries and the small community. I love the idea of it, but every time I try to ship a rea

My biggest problem with Elixir is the lack of support for 3rd-party libraries and the small community. I love the idea of it, but every time I try to ship a real project in LiveView, I'm left feeling like the community is not that mature. Maybe coming from a Go backend React frontend stack, that might be the case, but maybe for quick CRUD apps, it's great.

dpflan 1y ago
Elixir is pretty "nifty", and has Rails feels. I have worked on and seen its performance compared to scaled up Rails application. The BEAM / OTP is a very cool system to program on top of. I think it would be a great underlying system to develop a consciousness for AI systems with its concurrency paradigms and message passing, node connecting, other builtins. I'm not sure if the AI/ML focused Elixir projects like Nx have really taken off, but again, an Elixir based system that accepts numerous connections, passes messages around like exciting synaptic communications between functions... it just seems cool, maybe just on paper...
- lab14 1y ago
  What do you mean "consciousness for AI systems"?
  - dpflan 1y ago
    When you consider the message passing paradigm, I can envision how that simulates neuro-chemical communication between neurons (now here being functions that do things). So there is a design for communication between functions, then there are memory storage and information retrieval parts of the system, short-term RAM, long-term HD/SSD, databases, cache-systems, where relevant information can be and become manipulated. Long and short running processes, acceptance of fail-fast and that communications can fail and that's just part of software system life (I assume also a similar idea in the human brain, don't you find yourself forgetting something you were just thinking about?). There is then the external part of the system, accepting inputs from the outside.
    - lab14 1y ago
      The message passing paradigm is called the "Actor Model" and was invented in the 70s IIRC. It's available in most programming languages and it's not something exclusive to Elixir by any means. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actor_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actor_model
      - dpflan 1y ago
        Correct, it's not strictly unique to this. Even Ruby has it, but Ruby does not have BEAM/OTP. Smalltalk was a fun language to work with, albeit academically.
        nasmorn 1y ago
        Having built a mediumish soft realtime queue processing solution on rails I gotta say it was not great. If we didn’t kinda grow into it I would not have chosen ruby
        dpflan 1y ago
        Thanks for sharing. Yeah, I think that's a problem with bolted on functionality. Did you end up building a new version with a different language? What kind of problems did you encounter that made the solution "not great"?
        nasmorn 1y ago
        We eventually managed to build something in sidekiq that did the job but if your jobs are not unrelated and you want to make sure not to starve any specific resource the options in ruby are just way worse than eg Elixir
        dpflan 1y ago
        Are you able to provide more context and details? It’s always interesting to learn about system design and architecture decisions from real world examples.
biql 1y ago
Just curious, what libraries did you miss in particular compared to Go?

dpflan 1y ago

Elixir is pretty "nifty", and has Rails feels. I have worked on and seen its performance compared to scaled up Rails application. The BEAM / OTP is a very cool system to program on top of. I think it would be a great underlying system to develop a consciousness for AI systems with its concurrency paradigms and message passing, node connecting, other builtins. I'm not sure if the AI/ML focused Elixir projects like Nx have really taken off, but again, an Elixir based system that accepts numerous connections, passes messages around like exciting synaptic communications between functions... it just seems cool, maybe just on paper...

lab14 1y ago
What do you mean "consciousness for AI systems"?
- dpflan 1y ago
  When you consider the message passing paradigm, I can envision how that simulates neuro-chemical communication between neurons (now here being functions that do things). So there is a design for communication between functions, then there are memory storage and information retrieval parts of the system, short-term RAM, long-term HD/SSD, databases, cache-systems, where relevant information can be and become manipulated. Long and short running processes, acceptance of fail-fast and that communications can fail and that's just part of software system life (I assume also a similar idea in the human brain, don't you find yourself forgetting something you were just thinking about?). There is then the external part of the system, accepting inputs from the outside.
  - lab14 1y ago
    The message passing paradigm is called the "Actor Model" and was invented in the 70s IIRC. It's available in most programming languages and it's not something exclusive to Elixir by any means. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actor_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actor_model
    - dpflan 1y ago
      Correct, it's not strictly unique to this. Even Ruby has it, but Ruby does not have BEAM/OTP. Smalltalk was a fun language to work with, albeit academically.
      - nasmorn 1y ago
        Having built a mediumish soft realtime queue processing solution on rails I gotta say it was not great. If we didn’t kinda grow into it I would not have chosen ruby
        dpflan 1y ago
        Thanks for sharing. Yeah, I think that's a problem with bolted on functionality. Did you end up building a new version with a different language? What kind of problems did you encounter that made the solution "not great"?
        nasmorn 1y ago
        We eventually managed to build something in sidekiq that did the job but if your jobs are not unrelated and you want to make sure not to starve any specific resource the options in ruby are just way worse than eg Elixir
        dpflan 1y ago
        Are you able to provide more context and details? It’s always interesting to learn about system design and architecture decisions from real world examples.

biql 1y ago

Just curious, what libraries did you miss in particular compared to Go?