4 ms·

A Week with Elixir

33 points by Whitespace 13y ago

anandabits 13y ago
Elixir sounds very nice! Thanks for sharing the link. It's really exciting to see functional programming beginning to be recognized by more and more developers. It looks like Elixir will be a great language to help that trend grow.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
cocoflunchy 13y ago
Does anyone know if the Elixir team took these comments into account? (The post if from May 2013)
- rubiquity 13y ago
  That is only four months ago. Elixir is a programming language, not a wrapper to the Twitter API. I imagine Jose Valim is taking this into account. Joe Armstrong is someone you listen to when he speaks.
sambeau 13y ago
I'll take this opportunity to re-remind HN of Wadler's Law: In any language design, the total time spent discussing a feature in this list is proportional to two raised to the power of its position. 0. Semantics 1. Syntax 2. Lexical syntax 3. Lexical syntax of comments http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Wadler's_Law http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Wadler's_Law
zachallaun 13y ago
Some previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5798049 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5798049
rdtsc 13y ago
I admire Joe Armstrong. He has tremendous experience and yet he is very humble (at least, say if you compare him with Linus). He is quite up there in age, where lots of people sort of give up and move to Florida to retirement homes. Joe still programs, explores new languages, writes Erlang books (he has a new one coming out soon), gives talks. You can tell from his voice he is still passionate and excited about programming, about fault tolerance and about distributed systems.
benaiah 13y ago
Slight quibble: his JS example is a bit contrived. He gives the following: js> a = 5; 5 js> f = function(x) { return x+a }; function (x){return x+a} js> f(10) 15 js> a = 100 100 js> f(10) 110 Well, yes, this is true, but it's not a problem with JS' closures, it's a problem with its variable declaration. a is declared as a global variable by default. Yes, this is bad, and everyone knows it's bad, but it's a bit orthogonal to closures. It's very simple to solve this in JS: js> a = 5; 5 js> f = function (x) { var a = 5; return x + a }; function(x){var a;return x+a} js> f(10) 15 js> a = 100 100 js> f(10) 15
- Adrock 13y ago
  I'm quibbling with a quibble, but I don't agree that it's orthogonal to closures. Your example doesn't really demonstrate the eponymous "closing" aspect of the closure and doesn't solve the problem that the OP is calling out. Closures are functions that refer to non-local variables. [1] [2] Whether the language provides lexical or dynamic scoping [3] is critical to how and when closures can be used in that language. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closure_(computer_science) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closure_(computer_science) [2] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Guide/Closures https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Guid... [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scope_(computer_science)#Lexical_scoping_and_dynamic_scoping http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scope_(computer_science)#Lexica...

33 points by Whitespace 13y ago

Elixir sounds very nice! Thanks for sharing the link. It's really exciting to see functional programming beginning to be recognized by more and more developers. It looks like Elixir will be a great language to help that trend grow.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

cocoflunchy 13y ago

Does anyone know if the Elixir team took these comments into account? (The post if from May 2013)

rubiquity 13y ago
That is only four months ago. Elixir is a programming language, not a wrapper to the Twitter API. I imagine Jose Valim is taking this into account. Joe Armstrong is someone you listen to when he speaks.

sambeau 13y ago

I'll take this opportunity to re-remind HN of Wadler's Law: In any language design, the total time spent discussing a feature in this list is proportional to two raised to the power of its position. 0. Semantics 1. Syntax 2. Lexical syntax 3. Lexical syntax of comments http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Wadler's_Law http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Wadler's_Law

zachallaun 13y ago

Some previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5798049 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5798049

rdtsc 13y ago

I admire Joe Armstrong. He has tremendous experience and yet he is very humble (at least, say if you compare him with Linus). He is quite up there in age, where lots of people sort of give up and move to Florida to retirement homes. Joe still programs, explores new languages, writes Erlang books (he has a new one coming out soon), gives talks. You can tell from his voice he is still passionate and excited about programming, about fault tolerance and about distributed systems.

benaiah 13y ago

Slight quibble: his JS example is a bit contrived. He gives the following: js> a = 5; 5 js> f = function(x) { return x+a }; function (x){return x+a} js> f(10) 15 js> a = 100 100 js> f(10) 110 Well, yes, this is true, but it's not a problem with JS' closures, it's a problem with its variable declaration. a is declared as a global variable by default. Yes, this is bad, and everyone knows it's bad, but it's a bit orthogonal to closures. It's very simple to solve this in JS: js> a = 5; 5 js> f = function (x) { var a = 5; return x + a }; function(x){var a;return x+a} js> f(10) 15 js> a = 100 100 js> f(10) 15

Adrock 13y ago
I'm quibbling with a quibble, but I don't agree that it's orthogonal to closures. Your example doesn't really demonstrate the eponymous "closing" aspect of the closure and doesn't solve the problem that the OP is calling out. Closures are functions that refer to non-local variables. [1] [2] Whether the language provides lexical or dynamic scoping [3] is critical to how and when closures can be used in that language. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closure_(computer_science) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closure_(computer_science) [2] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Guide/Closures https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Guid... [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scope_(computer_science)#Lexical_scoping_and_dynamic_scoping http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scope_(computer_science)#Lexica...