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Ask HN: Who regrets choosing Elixir?

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Re: Ask HN: Who regrets choosing Elixir?

#251

Post by woobity »

TickleSteve wrote: post #156
brudgers wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

let it crash != robustness not required Let it crash is an engineering design for systems large enough that statistically unlikely failures occur regularly. Like a data center or the original use case, telephone switch centers. Even if let it crash worked, it seems philosophically inappropriate for a drone controller.

Not at all, "let it crash" is simply a way of phrasing "consider reset in your flow of control". In embedded systems, certainly safety-critical ones, you have to consider the possibility of a reset path at all points in your flow of control. Your code resetting is a valid flow of control. This is absolutely necessary to get a properly robust system. Your drone system needs to be able to handle a reset at any point an…

That has nothing to do with what Elxiir and Erlang address. We're talking about isolating failures to individual processes serving a large number of users on a large scale system.

It's a completely different use case.

Re: Ask HN: Who regrets choosing Elixir?

#252

Post by rixed »

tpxl wrote: post #232
rixed wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For one, because you select your tools and reject others not based on their rational merits. Second, because you are also likely to favor recruitment of other devs based on this cultural choice not on their merit, eventually creating a clique.

Productivity and working knowledge of a tool do not count as rational merits? It takes years to really learn a language; a new framework and language per week is a stupid fad. If I run a Java shop I want a clique of Java devs, not Golang or Rust devs.

There is some truth in this, but less than commonly believed.

A "multi cultural", Jack-of-all-trades kind of team, that have a broader knowledge of many tools and techniques but less in depth familiarity with any of them, is more likely to use less features from the languages and tools that they have picked for a few of their strong points only, and less likely to indulge themselves with a level of sophistication that benefits their ego (and job security) more than the project.

> If I run a Jave shop

So I know a Python shop must be a business that sells reptiles, but what does a Java shop sell?

Re: Ask HN: Who regrets choosing Elixir?

#253

Post by rixed »

doteka wrote: post #192
rixed wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We're a Python shop Who decided that your company's raison d'être was to write some Python?

That's generally decided by the experience of the existing team members.

... whom an inexperienced hiring department entirely trust when they assure that the technologies they are already familiar with are the best fit for the company, let's hire only people who think the same?

Re: Ask HN: Who regrets choosing Elixir?

#254

Post by theonething »

JohnBooty wrote: post #89
phtrivier wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My counterpoints would be: First, if you're writing any kind of big code, than somewhere, in your code base, someone else is writing a code where the user name is spelled `username`. Or `user`. You don't have to be "asleep at the wheel" to not remember, or not know, which is which. So you're going to type the wrong one (not necessarily on purpose), and you'll get a runtime error. Not that bad, sure, but you'll get it…

Thank you for the thoughtful reply! So you're going to type the wrong one (not necessarily on purpose), and you'll get a runtime error. Not that bad, sure, but you'll get it. I agree with your facts but not your conclusion here. This certainly happens, but this is trivially caught by your integration tests. Now, it's certainly true that in a static language, your compiler would catch this for you. In a decent IDE it…

> I wind up having 10 different files open at a time in my text editor so I can see what various methods are expecting.

Huh, I thought this was normal. Not everyone does this?

Re: Ask HN: Who regrets choosing Elixir?

#255

Post by yodi »

I've spent roughly 3-4 years working experience on Django + Python in total. I've switched to Elixir / Phoenix since 2 years ago. I can say, the two biggest cons (despite is many cons) is the packages maturity and doing heavy lifting processing.

The first one, I can't complaint. Every programming language have it's weakness, to solve that I'm offload processing stuff into Rust. Luckily, Elixir have NIF integration with Rust.

Re: Ask HN: Who regrets choosing Elixir?

#256

Post by kovac »

carapace wrote: post #188
craigsmansion wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there was no one left who could support an Erlang system. If you have $200k "python engineers" on the payroll who wouldn't jump at the opportunity to do some additional Erlang, maybe it's time to reconsider your hiring practices and that is the real cautionary tale.

This, twice. Back in the day people would balk at hiring Python programmers saying, "there are so many more Java programmers", and I used to say, "Why would you hire a Java programmer who was unwilling or unable to learn Python?" Same logic applies here: Why would you hire a Python programmer who was unwilling or unable to learn Erlang? (Especially if you're going to pay them to do it!) If you can't switch languages…

Depends on the reason for switching. If I'm asked to switch because the new stack is going to have measurable improvements plus the language is going to stay and grow (just as examples may be Go or Rust right now), then sure. On the other hand, if the reason is because the company fucked up by relying on one idiot with an elitist mindset about programming languages, then that request going to have to come wrapped with very good incentives. If I'm a great java developer with tons of jobs to choose from, you are going to have to give me a very good reason to narrow my opportunities down for you. Otherwise, I'd say no and move on and you can go hunting for devs for a niche language and pray to Gods that the hiring situation will improve for you.

Your example of Java to Python doesn't represent the gravity of switching from Java to say Erlang or Haskell. You assume someone says no because they are unwilling or unable. We are unwilling, sometimes, because of the opportunity cost we have to pay for your fuck up.

Re: Ask HN: Who regrets choosing Elixir?

#257

Post by rlander »

nell wrote: post #146
rlander wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, if you’re rewriting an Erlang system in Python/JS and you don’t feel like you’re losing much, Erlang was the wrong choice from the beginning. The cases were Erlang shines are very hard to replicate in these languages.

> The cases were Erlang shines are very hard to replicate in these languages. I'm just beginning to get interested in the Erlang ecosystem. Could you please add more color to this and give some examples where Erlang shines? IIRC, Whatsapp backend used to be on Erlang.

Basically anything that is protocol-oriented like WhatsApp. A lot of people will say fault tolerant, low latency, highly available and massively concurrent systems, and they’ll be right, but I think that’s only half the story. You also get a battle-tested blueprint for building these kinds of distributed systems. You will find a pattern here and there in other languages and VMs, but the cohesiveness of the package (language + BEAM + OTP + observability + patterns) is something really unique. Compare this to the Java ecosystem, where there are dozens of concurrency primitives and an even greater number of distributed systems libraries and frameworks like Akka, Mesos, Zookeeper, Storm, Flink, Samza, Heron, Helix...

Re: Ask HN: Who regrets choosing Elixir?

#258

Post by piaste »

kovac wrote: post #256
carapace wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This, twice. Back in the day people would balk at hiring Python programmers saying, "there are so many more Java programmers", and I used to say, "Why would you hire a Java programmer who was unwilling or unable to learn Python?" Same logic applies here: Why would you hire a Python programmer who was unwilling or unable to learn Erlang? (Especially if you're going to pay them to do it!) If you can't switch languages…

Depends on the reason for switching. If I'm asked to switch because the new stack is going to have measurable improvements plus the language is going to stay and grow (just as examples may be Go or Rust right now), then sure. On the other hand, if the reason is because the company fucked up by relying on one idiot with an elitist mindset about programming languages, then that request going to have to come wrapped wit…

> If I'm a great java developer with tons of jobs to choose from, you are going to have to give me a very good reason to narrow my opportunities down for you.

Why would learning a new tool narrow rather than widen your opportunities?

It's not like you forgot all you know about Java.

Re: Ask HN: Who regrets choosing Elixir?

#259

Post by kovac »

piaste wrote: post #258
kovac wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on the reason for switching. If I'm asked to switch because the new stack is going to have measurable improvements plus the language is going to stay and grow (just as examples may be Go or Rust right now), then sure. On the other hand, if the reason is because the company fucked up by relying on one idiot with an elitist mindset about programming languages, then that request going to have to come wrapped wit…

> If I'm a great java developer with tons of jobs to choose from, you are going to have to give me a very good reason to narrow my opportunities down for you. Why would learning a new tool narrow rather than widen your opportunities? It's not like you forgot all you know about Java.

Learning an obscure tool that eventually dies is a waste of time. Think learning a language only you and a few of your friends speak. This in itself is good enough reason to be cautious about what you invest your time in learning.

Languages and specially the tool chain and the way of doing things around them evolve. If you spend like 5 years doing something else and come back to it, you'll find things have changed a lot. You may argue that it's easy to relearn this. But from a job perspective, the guy who has been using the exact same tech stack in the recent years will often be a better bet than a guy who wrote Java in version 1. This is very true for C#. Syntax, design principles, tools, method of deployments all have changed rapidly. Professionally, you want to be as up to date as possible in the area you worked in or you get rusty. You can learn new things on your time for their own utility. Flushing down 40-60 hours a week on a useless piece of knowledge is bad all round to me.

Re: Ask HN: Who regrets choosing Elixir?

#260

Post by 411111111111111 »

winrid wrote: post #249
carapace wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This, twice. Back in the day people would balk at hiring Python programmers saying, "there are so many more Java programmers", and I used to say, "Why would you hire a Java programmer who was unwilling or unable to learn Python?" Same logic applies here: Why would you hire a Python programmer who was unwilling or unable to learn Erlang? (Especially if you're going to pay them to do it!) If you can't switch languages…

Well, a Java developer isn't going to want to give up the JVM, their type safety, and great tooling, for a start. I get being interested in Erlang if you're doing Python. But interested in doing Python as a Java dev? Probably not.

Seriously, why doesn't python have a maven equivalent yet?

And no fat-binaries. Nor self executing binaries. It's just as old and having em basically just boils down to enforcing conventions. But nope, nothing. There have been attempts by some such as shiv, but really... None are even remotely as usable as maven is.

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