Elixir's concurrency primitives & actor system make some concurrent and parallel jobs much easier than I'm used to in other languages.
Wouldn't you be able to do the exact same things in erlang?
Ask HN: What can you do in one language that can't be done as well in others?
21–30 of 30 posts
Re: Ask HN: What can you do in one language that can't be done as well in others?
#22Erlang - Actor-based software design and its inherit benefits are trivial to implement compared to (most) other languages. By design, almost trivial distribution across many nodes without resorting to specialized APIs (that aren't common across all platforms) or separate coordination languages. Ada - The type system and the manner in which it can be used to constrain your software (in a positive way) makes ensuring c…
Re inconclusive: Erlang's language is concise, well-designed, and oriented around the concurrency model. Try tacking it onto C and it won't work well [0]. Take that concurrency model and put it into Python or Lisp or Smalltalk, and it could work fine. Those are expressive languages that are sufficiently malleable to bring in foreign concepts in a native looking fashion. [0] It won't look as clean. It'll work, but it…
I agree with Lisp (and it has even been done by key Erlang people), I am willing to believe SmallTalk (though it would be tempting to put the process boundary around every instance), but Python? Have you watched the early talks about why Erlang is designed the way that it is? Python is way way too imperitive in nature, having a syntax that makes functional subsets extremely limited and awkward.
Re: Ask HN: What can you do in one language that can't be done as well in others?
#23Re: Ask HN: What can you do in one language that can't be done as well in others?
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
Re inconclusive: Erlang's language is concise, well-designed, and oriented around the concurrency model. Try tacking it onto C and it won't work well [0]. Take that concurrency model and put it into Python or Lisp or Smalltalk, and it could work fine. Those are expressive languages that are sufficiently malleable to bring in foreign concepts in a native looking fashion. [0] It won't look as clean. It'll work, but it…
I agree with Lisp (and it has even been done by key Erlang people), I am willing to believe SmallTalk (though it would be tempting to put the process boundary around every instance), but Python? Have you watched the early talks about why Erlang is designed the way that it is? Python is way way too imperitive in nature, having a syntax that makes functional subsets extremely limited and awkward.
In my limited experience I feel my intuition is correct that you could make something that looks and mostly acts like erlang's concurrency stuffs in python. But it's not my main language by a long shot so I could well be wrong.
Re: Ask HN: What can you do in one language that can't be done as well in others?
#25In Python you can code an MMO, manipulate a database, set off a Hadoop job processing petabyes of big data in parallel on a thousand servers, conduct statistical analysis on the result set, generate beautiful and meaningful data visualizations, run a web server to make your program accessible to the world, stick an API onto it, and give artificial intelligence to a robot. As Heinlein wrote, "Specialization is for insects."
Re: Ask HN: What can you do in one language that can't be done as well in others?
#26I know PHP isn't very popular here, but it's awesome for string manipulation, parsing files. One-line that reads the file, splits multiple lines into an array: Want to sort them alphabetically? Add sort($l); Trim them? $trimmed = array_map(trim, $l); Remove duplicates? $unique = array_unique($trimmed);
Just FYI why i lold at this beeing a fitting example: File.read("in.txt").split("\n").sort.map(&:trim).uniq No need for X temporary variables and N lines of code in ruby. Also notice the better readability as everything happens from left to right?
Indeed, Ruby is a beautiful language, but so ridiculously slow.
Re: Ask HN: What can you do in one language that can't be done as well in others?
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just FYI why i lold at this beeing a fitting example: File.read("in.txt").split("\n").sort.map(&:trim).uniq No need for X temporary variables and N lines of code in ruby. Also notice the better readability as everything happens from left to right?
Indeed, Ruby is a beautiful language, but so ridiculously slow.
While i would say thats a non issue in webdevelopment and scripting, i agree that compared to others its just slow
Re: Ask HN: What can you do in one language that can't be done as well in others?
#28Gallina (The programming language used in Coq) -> Theorem proving assistance
Re: Ask HN: What can you do in one language that can't be done as well in others?
#29Not sure how many other languages support this, but I was pleasantly surprised when I used it in typescript. My first exposure to Intersection types:
T Extends Foo | Bar
T Extends Foo & Bar
Re: Ask HN: What can you do in one language that can't be done as well in others?
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's also one of the coolest features in Elixir IMO. http://elixir-lang.org/getting-started/enumerables-and-strea...
Awesome. Is Elixir prevalent in production yet? Will it be? I think I want to learn either OCaml or Elixir next.
It's probably more prevalent than OCaml at this point despite it's young age. It builds on top of Erlang/OTP which is quite battle tested and used by several major companies. The community behind it is quite strong as well.