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Lovely Week with Elixir

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31–40 of 139 posts

Re: Lovely Week with Elixir

#31

Elixir is decent and I've worked with it a fair amount in production systems... Mostly Rubyists seem to really click with it. And ruby idioms are all over it - you can taste its history and proximity to ruby's ecosystem. As a scala dev that ended up working with elixir for a couple years, my opinion is that a typesafe elixir-like language would really bring BEAM back into the mainstream. Akka is alright but it's shoe…

The older I get the grumpier runtime errors make me. I want ReasonML (language!) and Erlang (OTP!) to have a baby, and I want it birthed by the Go runtime. (Go? Yeah, Go. I don't love the language, but I am a lover of low latency and garbage collection, what can I say?) Yes, there's Gleam, but if something's based on BEAM, the throughput generally won't impress. :-( Would seem a shame to do all that static typing, an…

"I think there's a sweet spot for a language that accepts mutability inside of actors, but only allows immutable objects to be sent as messages"

Absolutely agree. I had great hopes an "Actor" type would be created in Swift, where every public function would be thread-safe, accept only "pure" structs / value objects, and which would automatically run on its own coroutine.

Unfortunately the concurrency story seems completely abandoned for this language.

Re: Lovely Week with Elixir

#32
post #29

I learned Elixir a few weeks ago as a quarantine self-improvement project and pretty much loved it. There are some warts, as in any language. As someone who's primarily worked in Go and Java in the past and has also been learning Rust I don't super love the optional typing thing, and I end up missing higher-level data constructs like interfaces and traits. But there are some great language features, like guards and p…

> I don't super love the optional typing thing It might not be a plus if you're writing a web-app, or some other kind of easily-restarted "shared-nothing business layer" system. But get deep-enough into absorbing the Zen of Erlang (i.e. by trying to write a big-deal telecom system; or by working on a distributable Erlang DBMS like CouchDB), and you'll come to appreciate it. Specifically, you'll realize that it'd actu…

[deleted]

Re: Lovely Week with Elixir

#33
post #8

If you're interested in using Elixir, jump right into Phoenix with LiveView. It is fantastic for prototyping new tools. Once you learn the basics of LiveView, it's ridiculously easy to create the web UI that interacts with your Elixir back-end. For a while I was using Phoenix Elm as my stack and I enjoy programming in Elm. But there's a lot of boilerplate you have to tediously connect for every input and output on bo…

I really hope there's a book covering more in depth on how to use LiveView. Im a little bit of a noob in programming and mostly learn using book for the first few steps. A lot of my coworker asking me to learn through docs as it seems to be more "full" but I found it's a bit steep learning with it compared to book that usually hold your hand through each concept. This is how I learnt Go web programming about 8 months ago.

Re: Lovely Week with Elixir

#34
post #23
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dude, LiveView is wild . It feels kind of magical, and I think people are gonna start adopting slowly, then all at once. There's an awesome blog post on their website. where Chris McCord, creator of Phoenix, builds a real-time Twitter clone in 15 minutes. https://www.phoenixframework.org/blog/build-a-real-time-twit...

I've been watching Elixir/Phoenix/LiveView from the sidelines, reading just enough to salivate a little but still left with the feeling that my use-cases wouldn't be adequately covered by it. Which kind of SPAs wouldn't work well in LiveView? I'm working on an app in Ember right now where a lot of data is fetched by the client asynchronously and then either showed once its fetched or only when the user pushes a butto…

The spas that won't work are the ones that need to keep state while offline. Everything else works pretty fantastic, and arguably better than most spas which need to do heavyweight xhr Json or grpc calls, though if you can have a persistent grpc connection over websocket you might be competitive performance-wise.

Re: Lovely Week with Elixir

#35

I learned Elixir a few weeks ago as a quarantine self-improvement project and pretty much loved it. There are some warts, as in any language. As someone who's primarily worked in Go and Java in the past and has also been learning Rust I don't super love the optional typing thing, and I end up missing higher-level data constructs like interfaces and traits. But there are some great language features, like guards and p…

[deleted]

Re: Lovely Week with Elixir

#36

Elixir is decent and I've worked with it a fair amount in production systems... Mostly Rubyists seem to really click with it. And ruby idioms are all over it - you can taste its history and proximity to ruby's ecosystem. As a scala dev that ended up working with elixir for a couple years, my opinion is that a typesafe elixir-like language would really bring BEAM back into the mainstream. Akka is alright but it's shoe…

This 100%.

Dialyzer helps a bit but is difficult to work with due to really cryptic errors. Also the workflow of having the typechecker run as a separate process not part of the compiler feels really cumbersome; it's easy not to notice you have a type error somewhere (often miles away from where the error originates!).

Re: Lovely Week with Elixir

#37

I love Elixir. Phoenix makes web development a pleasure and LiveView is even more exciting. I would love to find a job doing it.

Kamanahealth.com is hiring, remote-first, and doing a lot to help combat covid. I don't work there, just got got an email from a friend noting that they are looking for Elixir devs. https://www.notion.so/Kamana-is-Hiring-644e0dd0eb2d433daf7a7...

Re: Lovely Week with Elixir

#38

Elixir is decent and I've worked with it a fair amount in production systems... Mostly Rubyists seem to really click with it. And ruby idioms are all over it - you can taste its history and proximity to ruby's ecosystem. As a scala dev that ended up working with elixir for a couple years, my opinion is that a typesafe elixir-like language would really bring BEAM back into the mainstream. Akka is alright but it's shoe…

I would argue that if you're looking for a simpler way to build CRUD apps, just skip the middleman and use postgREST. I've been playing with Elixir and Phoenix, and while they're pretty great I like postgREST much better. You eliminate an unnecessary (in most cases) abstraction and backing onto the grown up postgresql authorization and authentication is invaluable for securing your app.

For non webapp stuff I've been happy using golang.

Re: Lovely Week with Elixir

#39
post #33
post #8

If you're interested in using Elixir, jump right into Phoenix with LiveView. It is fantastic for prototyping new tools. Once you learn the basics of LiveView, it's ridiculously easy to create the web UI that interacts with your Elixir back-end. For a while I was using Phoenix Elm as my stack and I enjoy programming in Elm. But there's a lot of boilerplate you have to tediously connect for every input and output on bo…

I really hope there's a book covering more in depth on how to use LiveView. Im a little bit of a noob in programming and mostly learn using book for the first few steps. A lot of my coworker asking me to learn through docs as it seems to be more "full" but I found it's a bit steep learning with it compared to book that usually hold your hand through each concept. This is how I learnt Go web programming about 8 months…

Have a look at the free Phoenix LiveView course by Pragmatic Studio: https://pragmaticstudio.com/phoenix-liveview (I'm not affiliated with them).

The first six of eventually 15 lessons are already available and they really helped me grasp the basics. I've already implemented a few small tools using LiveView - it's a real breath of fresh air!

Re: Lovely Week with Elixir

#40

Elixir is decent and I've worked with it a fair amount in production systems... Mostly Rubyists seem to really click with it. And ruby idioms are all over it - you can taste its history and proximity to ruby's ecosystem. As a scala dev that ended up working with elixir for a couple years, my opinion is that a typesafe elixir-like language would really bring BEAM back into the mainstream. Akka is alright but it's shoe…

The older I get the grumpier runtime errors make me. I want ReasonML (language!) and Erlang (OTP!) to have a baby, and I want it birthed by the Go runtime. (Go? Yeah, Go. I don't love the language, but I am a lover of low latency and garbage collection, what can I say?) Yes, there's Gleam, but if something's based on BEAM, the throughput generally won't impress. :-( Would seem a shame to do all that static typing, an…

I would be very surprised that Go had lower latency than BEAM based languages, higher throughput/better CPU utilisation OK, lower latency??

Do you have a benchmark showing this?

As for Pony, in theory it should be great but it looks very complex..

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