You are right. However I believe that, after some time, beginner Elixir developers become intermediate Elixir developers and they get to used to having a little bit of Erlang here and there.
Ask HN: Is Erlang an albatross to Elixir adoption?
101–109 of 109 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is Erlang an albatross to Elixir adoption?
#102As the creator of Phoenix, I've never written an Erlang program fwiw. That said, I frequent the Erlang docs and most seasoned Elixir developers will do the same because the standard library is a wealth of features, and the documentation while not 2022 polished, remains a remarkable resource. > I don't know what a solution is, but perhaps a concerted effort to create a documentation and library ecosystem that never li…
Devil's advocate: What would it take to programmatically port/transpile the core of Erlang's ecosystem to Elixir? Pick the killer app to serve as the root node (Phoenix?) and walk back to the leaves (OTP, popular libraries, etc). Do a 1-time cutover of literally everything. Fork/port ERTS (incl BEAM) to make Elixir-native and rebrand it. Etc. While I generally agree that "rewriting as bad" there is something to be sa…
This is what I too have wondered.
I'm curious if there are more devs in elixir or erlang.
I'm also curious if it'd be easy enough to have elixir->erlang transpiling, so those wanting from elixir could pull it.
Re: Ask HN: Is Erlang an albatross to Elixir adoption?
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
+100 — the heart of the problem
Imagine it's an important lib you can't just replace and there's a bug you need fixed and can't just wait for the maintainer to do it for you. Now you suddenly need to understand that language enough to do that. To some extent this happens very often, I've had it in Clojure+Java and PHP+C libraries.
Exactly the problem I've run into on more than one occasion. And the erlang libs I'm referencing have almost zero documentation, so it really means "RTFC" which then is painful :D
Re: Ask HN: Is Erlang an albatross to Elixir adoption?
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is fantastic feedback. I always love reading posts like yours. Three quick notes to complement what you said: * The formatter is always a balancing act. The behaviour you see is because people get really upset when we don't respect their line breaks (and, as you correctly said, we can't later know which newlines were introduced by us). You can try formatting more frequently to get feedback sooner (that's what I…
People like José are why I like the Elixir community. So many others would have taken offense and become defensive.
To be fair to you, I think you phrased your feedback much better than many on this site do. You listed a lot of pros, gave context for where you are in your journey with the platform, admitted you don't know everything yet, and focused your constructive criticism on the language and not the contributors. I just wanted to call that out as I often see the opposite here, but I do agree that José, Chris, and co do rock and lead the community really well!
Re: Ask HN: Is Erlang an albatross to Elixir adoption?
#105Elixir has a reputation for being relatively complicated and this (having to understand Erlang when developing in Elixir) is one of the reasons. Many CTO's don't want to touch it due to extra complexity, lack of devs etc etc. If concurrency is that important (it usually isn't but lets say it is) they can go with k8s - Node, Go etc (it doesn't really matter - k8s will quite easily scale just about any stack).
There are just many easier paths of less resistance than Elixir in most cases.
Also - Elixir is functional or close to functional so it is quite a big mind shift so another hurdle to onboard newcomers.
Anyway, trying to increase a language's adoption is very very hard..
Re: Ask HN: Is Erlang an albatross to Elixir adoption?
#106As the creator of Phoenix, I've never written an Erlang program fwiw. That said, I frequent the Erlang docs and most seasoned Elixir developers will do the same because the standard library is a wealth of features, and the documentation while not 2022 polished, remains a remarkable resource. > I don't know what a solution is, but perhaps a concerted effort to create a documentation and library ecosystem that never li…
Is it a bit of extra complexity? Yes. Does it cause friction for new devs? No - I can't think of any mainstream Elixir use cases that require Erlang libraries, with the exception of math operators like `:math.sqrt/1`. Chris' comment here is the golden example of this. And anyway, what does the user get in exchange for that extra layer of complexity? A unique high-concurrency VM with easy-to-use primitives that would…
> A unique high-concurrency VM with easy-to-use primitives that would require huge gobs of code and lots of added dependencies in other languages.
Truth is most web devs don't care about concurrency - it's a thing left for the ops team and with today's tools (k8s) its getting more and more trivial by the minute and it's only gonna get simpler and cheaper.
I'm not saying there aren't any use cases for Elixir, I'm just saying they're not that obvious or common.
Re: Ask HN: Is Erlang an albatross to Elixir adoption?
#107I want to point something out from an information tgeoretic point of view.
Can you say you know what is going on if you don't read the implementation code? I'm even fine with extending that to executable code.
You must read code. Code use sans understanding is dangerous. You can do immense harm without even realizing you're doing it. Look at Log4Shell, or MCAS.
The majority of your time as a computing professional should be spent reading code you'll be using. Abstraction is nice. Until it isn't.
I'll never understand the I shouldn't have to read code school of thinking. It's like saying you should never have to learn arithmetic.
Now there's a case to be made that in development communities that value convention, yes, you can get to a point you don't have to read as much code in that community, given everyone plays by the rules.
Colors.js or node-ipc is what happens when they don't. So even then, don't read at your own peril.
Re: Ask HN: Is Erlang an albatross to Elixir adoption?
#108> What about people who've tried elixir and moved on? I've tried it three times and it offered me nothing Erlang didn't. Erlang, on the other hand, offers me much that Elixir does not. In truth, I've never met anyone who likes Elixir except people who were already Ruby programmers. What's particularly weird is your attempt to dig at the Erlang docs. They're extracted the exact same way the Elixir ones are; it's just…
Elixir was a gateway to Erlang for me. I hadn't heard of Erlang before I started writing in Elixir, but all the discussion of why Elixir was so great revolved around Erlang and the BEAM. This lead me to Joe's distributed systems thesis and really changed how I approach writing code. The syntax takes a bit of getting used to, but I generally prefer the language. I haven't found anything that's a nice to work with for…
For web development for Erlang check out https://github.com/novaframework/nova
Re: Ask HN: Is Erlang an albatross to Elixir adoption?
#109As the creator of Phoenix, I've never written an Erlang program fwiw. That said, I frequent the Erlang docs and most seasoned Elixir developers will do the same because the standard library is a wealth of features, and the documentation while not 2022 polished, remains a remarkable resource. > I don't know what a solution is, but perhaps a concerted effort to create a documentation and library ecosystem that never li…
Devil's advocate: What would it take to programmatically port/transpile the core of Erlang's ecosystem to Elixir? Pick the killer app to serve as the root node (Phoenix?) and walk back to the leaves (OTP, popular libraries, etc). Do a 1-time cutover of literally everything. Fork/port ERTS (incl BEAM) to make Elixir-native and rebrand it. Etc. While I generally agree that "rewriting as bad" there is something to be sa…
But what would be a point of doing that?