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Ask HN: Scala or Elixir, What would you recommend me?

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Re: Ask HN: Scala or Elixir, What would you recommend me?

#11
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This type of question gets asked a lot on the net and as someone with experience I can say it rarely matters what language you know its what you have built, can build and your architectural skills that matter. The language is just a tool for the task and will vary depending on the task. So ask yourself what you want to build then choose the language, the other way around makes no sense. Its like saying I want to be a…

> This type of question gets asked a lot on the net and as someone with experience I can say it rarely matters what language you know its what you have built, can build and your architectural skills that matter He's asking what his next language should be. I don't get the vibe here of a new programmer thinking he's staking his entire future on what programming language he decides to learn. It's entirely possible to u…

"It's entirely possible to understand that the programming languages you know aren't as important as what you've built along with your knowledge of software engineering and computer science fundamentals, and yet still want input on the next PL you'll learn in your free time."

I get what you mean, but it still makes very little sense to me. If he had said I want to make a client/server chat system, then we could make a real suggestions between elixir and scala. He also wants to be able to write concurrent systems, the best way to do this is of course write concurrent systems, not learning concurrent lang structs in scala or elixir. Only when you write a distributed system are you going to encounter all the networking and data integrity problems that arise at those lower levels and these are the things that are important to know and will give him reasons to choose elixir or scala or erlang or golang or whatever works best for him while building that.

Re: Ask HN: Scala or Elixir, What would you recommend me?

#12
If you want to be hireable then forget about both learn Ruby or Java, you'll get tons of hiring options (depends on where you are and what types of companies you like)

Scala will get you more job openings now than Elixir, but less than Java jobs or even Rails/Node/Django jobs.

If you are into big data, then right now the most "hyped" toolset is Apache Spark and it is written in Scala and it does not have an Elixir API (not anytime soon)

One last thing, what do you prefer: dynamic typing or static typing? If you prefer dynamic Elixir is going to feel much better than Scala. If static typing is a must for you, Scala is your choice...

Also in Scala you get all of Java's ecosystem in terms of reusable libraries.

Elixir looks great and the Erlang VM is exciting and I know that my next language to play with is going to be Elixir. But this is because I already know Scala pretty well. (My main day job language)

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