111–120 of 183 posts
My experience with Elixir has been great but one area of improvement is debugging. Maybe it's because I'm so used to using something like Chrome's developer tools, but I wish there was something as easy to use for setting breakpoints and inspecting the environment. Would love to know how others are debugging currently!
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I think most people consider Java to be an interpreted language, it's interpreted by JVM. It's obviously somewhere in between, in the same way that JIT languages are, but it's still not native.
Not sure about the BEAM, but Java isn't considered an interpreted language at all. First, discerning the compilation step to IR is relevant, which is why for example, Python can be compiled or interpreted. That distinction matters. Even though it is compiled to intermediate representation, it is still compiled. Now, with regards to the intermediate representation, Java Byte Code is also not interpreted. Java Byte Cod…
Hotspot includes an interpreter -- your code may be interpreted until it gets hot and gets compiled.
Still, I don't think it's fair to call Java an interpreted language since the parts that are interpreted are only during warm up or slow enough not to matter.
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Are there no bad parts?
Of course they are, but thé article seems to be from someone interested by elixir, rather than someone who used it long enough to discover them (although I might have misunderstood the article.) From own experience, the problematic parts are : - deployment being a bit messy if you try to follow 12 factors (might be improving in 1.9) - absence of a decent debugger - younth of the ecosystem and size of the community (a…
And the post was very much intended to be enthusiastic about cool things, rather than nuanced and looking for problems. So I think your take-away is entirely fair.
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Phoenix LiveView is basically server side rendering in real time. The user's actions are sent to the Backend via WebSocket, and the Backend rerenders (parts of) the view and sends them to the user.
But ... why? Sends it back as ... HTML?
So "Welcome to $mysite, $username." would initially send the full rendering but if the data changes it would only send "Hacker News,lawik" over the wire. Somewhat simplified.
This covers it quite well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xJzHq8ru0M
My experience with Elixir has been great but one area of improvement is debugging. Maybe it's because I'm so used to using something like Chrome's developer tools, but I wish there was something as easy to use for setting breakpoints and inspecting the environment. Would love to know how others are debugging currently!
During a recent developer meetup in my country, I went to an elixir workshop where the host (an independent consultant) confided in us that several of her main clients had asked her to not reveal that they use elixir - they're apparently so happy with their choice that they treat it as a competitive advantage and claim to use a different stack when asked by competitors. I can't know for sure if she was bluffing, but…
Where are people getting their documentation for Phoenix? The stuff on the website is awful for grasping the bigger picture and how the parts of Phoenix combine. It gave me the impression of being an immature version of Rails when I tried it recently which doesn’t gel with the attitude people seem to have of it.
As someone suggested, check out the Hex docs. That is where you get the better in-depth stuff and API reference. I've found the Getting started-stuff very helpful but also a bit limited in scope.
The most interesting part of Nerves for me isn't rpi/embedded/resource-limited environments, but rather the ability to remove most/all of the security surface area of the userspace (say, in the cloud).
I've seen a few different nerves-systems targeting AWS EC2. Have you tried doing anything in particular with it?
It's just the Phoenix framework for which the initial setup of the project generator feels so opinionated. You have no options, no way to make a template for the generator. Phoenix's LiveView is a great feature and I want to use it. It's just Phoenix itself that feels off for me, not as straightforward as it should be. Does anyone else get this feeling?
What are its promising uses outside of web development? From the little I've seen it looks like a beautiful functional programming language, but I'm not even tangentially involved in web development.
My current favorite things in Elixir are not particularly web-related:
- Nerves, embedded Linux + the BEAM VM to do IoT-style things in a nicer way. The workflow compared to something like working from Raspbian seems a lot more sane to me.
- Scenic, OpenGL-rendered UI, for embedded hardware or other purposes. I recently used it to get text-rendering and geometries onto an eInk display with Nerves. One big reason for the creation of Scenic was to give IoT/connected devices UI that doesn't require a web stack. For many reasons, with security definitely being high on the list.