3 ms·
> writing Elixir is like writing Erlang I wrote both Elixir and Erlang code. Erlang is just useless to me as a programming language; it has many great ideas th
by shevy-java 4mo ago
> writing Elixir is like writing Erlang
I wrote both Elixir and Erlang code. Erlang is just useless to me as a
programming language; it has many great ideas though. I love the idea
of being able to think in terms of immortal, re-usable, safe objects
(Erlang does not call these objects, but to me this is OOP by Alan
Kay's definition. I don't use e. g. the java definition for OOP.)
Elixir built on that and made Erlang code optional, meaning people
could write more pleasent code. And here it succeeded. I am not sure
why Elixir succumbed to type madness now, but the comment that
"writing Elixir is like writing Erlang", is just simply not true.
Elixir is significantly better than Erlang with regard to writing
code. José Valim got inspiration for Elixir from ruby, to some
extent.
- asib 4mo agoYou're taking my comment way too literally. I'm basically just making a syntax comparison. Obviously Rust is not at all like Gleam in many ways either. It's just statically typed and has a similar syntax.
- senderista 4mo agoI agree that actor languages are the purest form of OOP as Alan Kay has expressed it. And unlike Smalltalk, Erlang just accepts that some things are naturally functions, not messages.
- Rendello 4mo agoErlang's Joe Armstrong and Alan Kay did a talk/interview together: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhOHn9TClXY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhOHn9TClXY
- ken-kost 4mo agoa great rabbit hole to fall into; thank you!
- klibertp 4mo agoSmalltalk has no problem at all with accepting that some things are naturally functions: it has always had blocks! The call operator is `value`, not `()`, but it's the same "apply a piece of code to some values" operation.
- satvikpendem 4mo agoWhy do you find Erlang useless, you just don't like the syntax?