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Elixir at PagerDuty

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Re: Elixir at PagerDuty

#21

Post by Jtsummers »

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?)

Strongly typed meaning that Elixir/Erlang don't allow:

  1 + "some string" + [A,List,Of,Somethings]
Compared to javascript where:

  1 + "2" == "12"
Statically typed means that variables and functions hold or return specific types which can be determined before execution.

Re: Elixir at PagerDuty

#22

Post by cnnrjcbsn »

cube2222 wrote: post #16

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.

It's pretty solid. You may have to roll something yourself for really esoteric APIs, but pretty much everything you probably want to use is supported already

Re: Elixir at PagerDuty

#23

Post by [deleted] »

brightball wrote: post #11
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 everyth…

[deleted]

Re: Elixir at PagerDuty

#24

Post by gamache »

Jtsummers wrote: post #21
gamache wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?)

Strongly typed meaning that Elixir/Erlang don't allow: 1 + "some string" + [A,List,Of,Somethings] Compared to javascript where: 1 + "2" == "12" Statically typed means that variables and functions hold or return specific types which can be determined before execution.

Type coercion does not equal weak typing -- I submit JS and Perl as examples where types are strong but there is a coercion protocol dependent on which types an operator expects around it.

Re: Elixir at PagerDuty

#25

Post by [deleted] »

cnnrjcbsn wrote: post #22
cube2222 wrote: post #16

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.

It's pretty solid. You may have to roll something yourself for really esoteric APIs, but pretty much everything you probably want to use is supported already

[deleted]

Re: Elixir at PagerDuty

#26

Post by cutler »

everdev wrote: post #3

> Elixir has been mostly selling itself: it works, it sits on a rock-solid platform, code is very understandable as the community has a healthy aversion towards the sort of “magic” that makes Rails tick, and it’s quite simple to pick up as it has a small surface area I was a huge Rails fan back in '07 and built a number of apps with it successfully, but I can't help feel like it's transition to a legacy framework has…

How can you compare the overall developer experience of Crystal, which isn't even 1.0 yet and has very few libraries, with the mature ecosystem of Rails?

Re: Elixir at PagerDuty

#27

Post by skrebbel »

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.

Just some random background for those reading about why Erlang/ElixirRust interop is A Big Thing.

The whole point of Erlang and Elixir is robustness in the face of high concurrency. All other design choices (eg functional programming, immutable data), follow from that goal. Core is that if one green thread ("process" in Erl/Ex lingo) crashes for whatever reason, the rest keep on running. Interop with native code is the sole exception here, which makes interop very scary. If a C function that's called into from Erl/Ex crashes, the entire program crashes. Boom, gone. Sure that holds for most other languages too, but Erlang/Elixir people get extra nervous because they're more accustomed to thinking about error scenarios and because they don't always have the same seven restart/recover layers outside the VM process that good devopsers wrap eg Node processes with because hey, no need, we have Erlang, we never crash.

As a result, the idea of a technology that allows writing native code that has a tremendously small likelihood of crashing is very appealing. Until recently, no such technology was available but Rust changed that. Rust allows writing native functions that can be called from Erlang/Elixir with much fewer worries than C/C++ native extensions ever did, because of all the safety guarantees provided by the compiler. This is a big thing and I hope that as the interop story improves, it means that Erlang/Elixir will in practice become much faster because more libraries will be rewritten in native code.

Re: Elixir at PagerDuty

#28

Post by freedomben »

everdev wrote: post #3

> Elixir has been mostly selling itself: it works, it sits on a rock-solid platform, code is very understandable as the community has a healthy aversion towards the sort of “magic” that makes Rails tick, and it’s quite simple to pick up as it has a small surface area I was a huge Rails fan back in '07 and built a number of apps with it successfully, but I can't help feel like it's transition to a legacy framework has…

I tend to agree. I love rails and have written a lot of apps in it. I'm newer to phoenix but I'm feeling much like I did early on in rails. Between Elixir/Phoenix and Crystal/Amber, I think rails is headed towards legacy as well. I'm not writing any new apps in rails. The good news at least, being condemned to a "legacy" rails app should still be fairly pleasant :-)

Re: Elixir at PagerDuty

#29

Post by Jtsummers »

gamache wrote: post #24
Jtsummers wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strongly typed meaning that Elixir/Erlang don't allow: 1 + "some string" + [A,List,Of,Somethings] Compared to javascript where: 1 + "2" == "12" Statically typed means that variables and functions hold or return specific types which can be determined before execution.

Type coercion does not equal weak typing -- I submit JS and Perl as examples where types are strong but there is a coercion protocol dependent on which types an operator expects around it.

Fair, C may have been a better example. Where nearly everything is actually just a block of bytes of various lengths and can be intermingled fairly freely with minimal effort to get anything past the compiler.

Sometimes useful, but the type system ends up offering few meaningful protections as a consequence.

Re: Elixir at PagerDuty

#30

Post by freedomben »

cutler wrote: post #26
everdev wrote: post #3

> Elixir has been mostly selling itself: it works, it sits on a rock-solid platform, code is very understandable as the community has a healthy aversion towards the sort of “magic” that makes Rails tick, and it’s quite simple to pick up as it has a small surface area I was a huge Rails fan back in '07 and built a number of apps with it successfully, but I can't help feel like it's transition to a legacy framework has…

How can you compare the overall developer experience of Crystal, which isn't even 1.0 yet and has very few libraries, with the mature ecosystem of Rails?

Not OP, and not Crystal, but comparing Phoenix ecosystem with Rails is pretty doable. There are a lot of packages available. Obviously not as much as on rubygems, but one can get a pretty good feel for the overall developer experience. My enjoyment of rails isn't really about the wide array of gems available anyway. It's the paradigms and community standards.
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