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Elixir v1.3 released

elixir-lang.org

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Re: Elixir v1.3 released

#61

Post by eddd »

I use phoenix and elixir, I agree with the statement that Elixir is awesome. But don't drink too much cool-aid - Elixir might be dangerous as well.

It is essentially a big pile of macros, so sometimes number of keywords that you have to keep in your head is staggering. Also, Elixir is a pretty big language - I knew Erlang before diving into it - so the barrier and number of concepts that you have to get familiar with is huge. Don't get me wrong - all these concepts/design patterns are necessary (I am thinking about BEAM and OTP here). Erlang (and therefore Elixir) is complete as development environment, that's where the amount of knowledge is coming from.

Cool intro to erlang/BEAM: http://www.slideshare.net/BrianTroutwine1/erlang-lfe-elixir-...

Re: Elixir v1.3 released

#62

Post by yelnatz »

eddd wrote: post #61

I use phoenix and elixir, I agree with the statement that Elixir is awesome. But don't drink too much cool-aid - Elixir might be dangerous as well. It is essentially a big pile of macros, so sometimes number of keywords that you have to keep in your head is staggering. Also, Elixir is a pretty big language - I knew Erlang before diving into it - so the barrier and number of concepts that you have to get familiar with…

I use elixir (and phoenix) as well, and this is my biggest gripe with the language.

When reading (and reviewing) code, sometimes you can't logically follow what's going on since most of the code is hidden behind macros.

It's ok if I'm on my IDE that helps expand macros to quickly check the flow, but when it's on a webpage or in a gist somewhere, you're on your own.

Re: Elixir v1.3 released

#63

Post by Donwangugi »

yelnatz wrote: post #62
eddd wrote: post #61

I use phoenix and elixir, I agree with the statement that Elixir is awesome. But don't drink too much cool-aid - Elixir might be dangerous as well. It is essentially a big pile of macros, so sometimes number of keywords that you have to keep in your head is staggering. Also, Elixir is a pretty big language - I knew Erlang before diving into it - so the barrier and number of concepts that you have to get familiar with…

I use elixir (and phoenix) as well, and this is my biggest gripe with the language. When reading (and reviewing) code, sometimes you can't logically follow what's going on since most of the code is hidden behind macros. It's ok if I'm on my IDE that helps expand macros to quickly check the flow, but when it's on a webpage or in a gist somewhere, you're on your own.

Which IDE do you use? I have been messing around with alchemist on emacs but the learning curve is pretty steep (i'm not an emacs guru).

Re: Elixir v1.3 released

#64

Post by biot »

bratsche wrote: post #60
biot wrote: post #51

Any best practice guides for running Elixir in production? How do you handle deployments, hotfixes, multi-node scaling, etc. in an automated way?

This doesn't answer all of your questions, but it was the fastest way I found to get an Elixir app into production: https://github.com/boldpoker/edeliver It handles all the basic things I needed to get an app up and running, and supports hot-code upgrades. It supports multi-host deployments, but I think if you want auto-scaling you'll need to do some more work. One thing to be aware of is that if you're deploying any…

Thank you. I hadn't run across that... it looks amazing.

Re: Elixir v1.3 released

#65

Post by antipax »

Super excited for this release.

I have to say that learning and using Elixir has been more pleasant than any other language I have ever worked with. Code is easy to follow due to the functional nature of the language, and the community is one of the best out there.

The applications I've written and deployed have been more stable and fault-tolerant than anything else I've ever done, and I've yet to have any performance issues with the language in production.

Re: Elixir v1.3 released

#66

Post by eddd »

Donwangugi wrote: post #63
yelnatz wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use elixir (and phoenix) as well, and this is my biggest gripe with the language. When reading (and reviewing) code, sometimes you can't logically follow what's going on since most of the code is hidden behind macros. It's ok if I'm on my IDE that helps expand macros to quickly check the flow, but when it's on a webpage or in a gist somewhere, you're on your own.

Which IDE do you use? I have been messing around with alchemist on emacs but the learning curve is pretty steep (i'm not an emacs guru).

I can recommend: Atom with https://github.com/msaraiva/atom-elixir

Re: Elixir v1.3 released

#67

Post by acangiano »

josevalim wrote: post #58
shrugger wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I switched from Ruby to Scala, and I have had an absolute blast. Elixir is sort of chained to BEAM, which doesn't appear to have as bright a future as the JVM or LLVM does, so Scala seemed like a safer bet. Reading about Elixir is cool sometimes, but then I look at Dotty, and I feel confident that I made the correct choice. I've also been keeping an eye on Crystal (statically typed Ruby-esque language, LLVM), but the…

> Elixir is sort of chained to BEAM, which doesn't appear to have as bright a future as the JVM or LLVM does, so Scala seemed like a safer bet. Where does this impression come from? The BEAM VM is maintained by Ericsson, we get new "major" releases every year. In the last years we got the maps data type, the new scalable timer API, better tracing facilities, dirty schedulers, and so on. Lately, at ElixirConf Berlin,…

I would argue that Elixir's success will further guarantee BEAM's future. (Not that it would die otherwise, but it doesn't hurt.)

Re: Elixir v1.3 released

#68

Post by [deleted] »

josevalim wrote: post #58
shrugger wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I switched from Ruby to Scala, and I have had an absolute blast. Elixir is sort of chained to BEAM, which doesn't appear to have as bright a future as the JVM or LLVM does, so Scala seemed like a safer bet. Reading about Elixir is cool sometimes, but then I look at Dotty, and I feel confident that I made the correct choice. I've also been keeping an eye on Crystal (statically typed Ruby-esque language, LLVM), but the…

> Elixir is sort of chained to BEAM, which doesn't appear to have as bright a future as the JVM or LLVM does, so Scala seemed like a safer bet. Where does this impression come from? The BEAM VM is maintained by Ericsson, we get new "major" releases every year. In the last years we got the maps data type, the new scalable timer API, better tracing facilities, dirty schedulers, and so on. Lately, at ElixirConf Berlin,…

[deleted]

Re: Elixir v1.3 released

#69

Post by dpeck »

flocial wrote: post #48

l used to be/still am a ruby on rails developer. I wrote a very naive web crawler in elixir within a week while learning elixir and I'm blown away by the performance. It basically maxes out my 2011 macbook air's cpu while staying under 200MB of RAM (and maybe another 500 for multiple postgres connections). It basically runs in the background on a computer that can barely handle Firefox with multiple tabs open. The on…

Not that you should do it too much since traversing arrays (lists) is expensive, but http://elixir-lang.org/docs/stable/elixir/Enum.html#at/3 gives you the ability to grab arbitrarily.

Re: Elixir v1.3 released

#70

Post by rcarmo »

This is good news, since a few tooling improvements have made it back to the Erlang ecosystem in general (and to lfe.io in particular, which I prefer over Elixir).
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