Elixir at PagerDuty • Hacker News Board

Re: Elixir at PagerDuty

#11

Post by brightball » Thu, Jun 14, 2018, 5:58 PM UTC

gandreani wrote: post #9

Thank you for sharing your experience! New languages is one of the "fun" parts of programming. Except at work. There are legitimate problems of legibility, maintainability, and training when introducing new stuff into the stack. Then there's the balance that we have to strike with re-writing old with new. How much do we gain with the new vs how much time is it gonna cost? Lately, these have been the things I worry ab…

True. In my experience that largely depends on the environment.

In Java or .NET shops, there is a significant investment in the surrounding infrastructure where the code is deployed. Has a huge impact in cost of switching. That's before even factoring in some of the inside baseball related to "discounts" on products like SQL Server if you have a certain number of employees with Microsoft certs.

For just about everything else though...it's not nearly as much of a headache.

Re: Elixir at PagerDuty

#12

Post by nemothekid » Thu, Jun 14, 2018, 5:59 PM UTC

anthonybullard wrote: post #2

I'd love to hear more about your troubles with Scala, and any examples of "clean code being hard to write". Do you think this had more to do with a lack of experience with strongly typed functional languages, or more to do with Scala's mixed paradigm? Also, thanks for sharing your story. Elixir is a great language and I love seeing it being adopted more and more everyday.

I'm pretty sure, as far as type systems go, Elixir is strongly typed as well as fairly functional (It's built on BEAM after all).

I think it has to do more with the latter. To me, Scala is too powerful - it rivals C++ in complexity, despite being half it's age. It almost feels like every Scala codebase is written in a different language, and I always felt I spent more time parsing Scala than understanding the code. It's a powerful language to write, but hard to read - almost the complete polar opposite of Go. As a result it can be very hard to bring new engineers up to scala, and even engineers that know Scala have to learn "your flavor" of Scala.

Re: Elixir at PagerDuty

#13

Post by enraged_camel » Thu, Jun 14, 2018, 5:59 PM UTC

Elixir is amazing. It is everything I want in a programming language: functional, fast, reliable and elegant.

I desperately want it to become more popular. To this end, I started writing a book that teaches Elixir (Phoenix) in combination with Vue.js. It's still in the early stages, but the thing I realized is that even writing the book is fun! This was very surprising to me because I typically don't find writing technical documentation/tutorials pleasant.

Anyway, if you're on the fence about Elixir, definitely check it out - especially if you're coming from a Rails background!

Re: Elixir at PagerDuty

#14

Post by gamache » Thu, Jun 14, 2018, 6:02 PM UTC

nemothekid wrote: post #12

anthonybullard wrote: post #2

I'd love to hear more about your troubles with Scala, and any examples of "clean code being hard to write". Do you think this had more to do with a lack of experience with strongly typed functional languages, or more to do with Scala's mixed paradigm? Also, thanks for sharing your story. Elixir is a great language and I love seeing it being adopted more and more everyday.

I'm pretty sure, as far as type systems go, Elixir is strongly typed as well as fairly functional (It's built on BEAM after all). I think it has to do more with the latter. To me, Scala is too powerful - it rivals C++ in complexity, despite being half it's age. It almost feels like every Scala codebase is written in a different language, and I always felt I spent more time parsing Scala than understanding the code. I…

Elixir is dynamically typed, just like Erlang and the BEAM. Strong typing is a most requested feature from outside the community, seldom from inside. (EDIT correct, strong typing is not static typing. Does anyone make weakly typed languages anymore?)

Re: Elixir at PagerDuty

#15

Post by nemothekid » Thu, Jun 14, 2018, 6:05 PM UTC

gamache wrote: post #14

nemothekid wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure, as far as type systems go, Elixir is strongly typed as well as fairly functional (It's built on BEAM after all). I think it has to do more with the latter. To me, Scala is too powerful - it rivals C++ in complexity, despite being half it's age. It almost feels like every Scala codebase is written in a different language, and I always felt I spent more time parsing Scala than understanding the code. I…

Elixir is dynamically typed, just like Erlang and the BEAM. Strong typing is a most requested feature from outside the community, seldom from inside. (EDIT correct, strong typing is not static typing. Does anyone make weakly typed languages anymore?)

According to wikipedia, Erlang/Elixir is strongly typed. I guess you and the other poster mean static typing?

Re: Elixir at PagerDuty

#16

Post by cube2222 » Thu, Jun 14, 2018, 6:06 PM UTC

How is the library ecosystem with elixir? Currently I'm usually using Go where I have a library for anything and I'm quite apprehensive to start using elixir if there's a lack of libraries.

Re: Elixir at PagerDuty

#17

Post by dudul » Thu, Jun 14, 2018, 6:08 PM UTC

gamache wrote: post #14

nemothekid wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure, as far as type systems go, Elixir is strongly typed as well as fairly functional (It's built on BEAM after all). I think it has to do more with the latter. To me, Scala is too powerful - it rivals C++ in complexity, despite being half it's age. It almost feels like every Scala codebase is written in a different language, and I always felt I spent more time parsing Scala than understanding the code. I…

Elixir is dynamically typed, just like Erlang and the BEAM. Strong typing is a most requested feature from outside the community, seldom from inside. (EDIT correct, strong typing is not static typing. Does anyone make weakly typed languages anymore?)

You may be confusing strongly and statically typed.

Re: Elixir at PagerDuty

#18

Post by qaq » Thu, Jun 14, 2018, 6:08 PM UTC

gamache wrote: post #10

jxub wrote: post #7

My impression about the Elixir/Erlang so far has been the same. > Elixir comes with one of the nicest and most helpful communities around Using Elixir, it's easy to write gorgeous code, with a language that for the most part is really minimalist, and you get to play with the great piece of software that OTP is without all the warts of Erlang (which is mostly the developer experience). The BEAM community is fantastic…

Rust is a community of very nice and helpful people, much like Elixir but with more money behind it. However, I certainly enjoy Elixir's unwillingness to break working code with every release, or to force users to build against nightly releases just to use any features from the last year. Rust is improving in this regard, but isn't quite there yet.

There is good interop story for Elixir/Rust. I would not be so sure about money bit either.

Re: Elixir at PagerDuty

#19

Post by rpeden » Thu, Jun 14, 2018, 6:09 PM UTC

gamache wrote: post #14

nemothekid wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure, as far as type systems go, Elixir is strongly typed as well as fairly functional (It's built on BEAM after all). I think it has to do more with the latter. To me, Scala is too powerful - it rivals C++ in complexity, despite being half it's age. It almost feels like every Scala codebase is written in a different language, and I always felt I spent more time parsing Scala than understanding the code. I…

Elixir is dynamically typed, just like Erlang and the BEAM. Strong typing is a most requested feature from outside the community, seldom from inside. (EDIT correct, strong typing is not static typing. Does anyone make weakly typed languages anymore?)

There's no reason a language can't be both strongly and dynamically typed (like Elixir or Python) or statically and weakly typed (like C). :)

Re: Elixir at PagerDuty

#20

Post by gamache » Thu, Jun 14, 2018, 6:11 PM UTC

qaq wrote: post #18

gamache wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rust is a community of very nice and helpful people, much like Elixir but with more money behind it. However, I certainly enjoy Elixir's unwillingness to break working code with every release, or to force users to build against nightly releases just to use any features from the last year. Rust is improving in this regard, but isn't quite there yet.

There is good interop story for Elixir/Rust. I would not be so sure about money bit either.

There's a fine interop story, I've used Rustler before. The problem is when Rust nightly is sufficiently broken that even the auto-generated Rustler boilerplate won't compile. :)