Live data from Hacker News

The BEAM Has Spoiled Me

gvaughn.github.io

1–10 of 88 posts

Re: The BEAM Has Spoiled Me

#2
The BEAM is great, but the Elixir language itself is really what spoiled me. After having written ruby for years, I really enjoy what the Elixir language has to offer. Pattern matching[0] and the pipe operator[1] eliminate a ton of intermediate variables. Functional programming took a while to get used to, but I'm really starting to like thinking immutably. Now that I'm more advanced in the language, I'm starting to get into the Lisp style hygienic (and unhygienic macros)[2]. The Elixir standard library is really well done, everything is consistent and well documented. Elixir language level built in libraries like ExUnit[3] and Embedded Elixir (EEx)[4] are very high quality. For me the BEAM is just the cherry on top, I really like the Elixir language itself!

[0] https://elixir-lang.org/getting-started/pattern-matching.htm...

[1] https://elixirschool.com/en/lessons/basics/pipe-operator/

[2] https://elixir-lang.org/getting-started/meta/macros.html

[3] https://hexdocs.pm/ex_unit/master/ExUnit.html

[4] https://hexdocs.pm/eex/EEx.html

Re: The BEAM Has Spoiled Me

#3

The BEAM is great, but the Elixir language itself is really what spoiled me. After having written ruby for years, I really enjoy what the Elixir language has to offer. Pattern matching[0] and the pipe operator[1] eliminate a ton of intermediate variables. Functional programming took a while to get used to, but I'm really starting to like thinking immutably. Now that I'm more advanced in the language, I'm starting to…

Can you recommend any learning materials that were particularly useful to you?

Re: The BEAM Has Spoiled Me

#4

The BEAM is great, but the Elixir language itself is really what spoiled me. After having written ruby for years, I really enjoy what the Elixir language has to offer. Pattern matching[0] and the pipe operator[1] eliminate a ton of intermediate variables. Functional programming took a while to get used to, but I'm really starting to like thinking immutably. Now that I'm more advanced in the language, I'm starting to…

The killer feature for me was the documentation. I got thrown into an Elixir application that uses Ecto and Phoenix and literally everything I ever had to do was documented and explained in Hexdocs.

Re: The BEAM Has Spoiled Me

#5

The BEAM is great, but the Elixir language itself is really what spoiled me. After having written ruby for years, I really enjoy what the Elixir language has to offer. Pattern matching[0] and the pipe operator[1] eliminate a ton of intermediate variables. Functional programming took a while to get used to, but I'm really starting to like thinking immutably. Now that I'm more advanced in the language, I'm starting to…

I love Erlang/Elixir and want to use it more, but I just don’t have any good use cases for it! I don’t often make big concurrent back ends - maybe REST APIs, but that didn’t seem easy last time I tried.

Re: The BEAM Has Spoiled Me

#6
post #5

The BEAM is great, but the Elixir language itself is really what spoiled me. After having written ruby for years, I really enjoy what the Elixir language has to offer. Pattern matching[0] and the pipe operator[1] eliminate a ton of intermediate variables. Functional programming took a while to get used to, but I'm really starting to like thinking immutably. Now that I'm more advanced in the language, I'm starting to…

I love Erlang/Elixir and want to use it more, but I just don’t have any good use cases for it! I don’t often make big concurrent back ends - maybe REST APIs, but that didn’t seem easy last time I tried.

Phoenix takes a bit of learning, but it’s not too bad. It also has pretty decent generators to create JSON/rest endpoints.

Re: The BEAM Has Spoiled Me

#7

The BEAM is great, but the Elixir language itself is really what spoiled me. After having written ruby for years, I really enjoy what the Elixir language has to offer. Pattern matching[0] and the pipe operator[1] eliminate a ton of intermediate variables. Functional programming took a while to get used to, but I'm really starting to like thinking immutably. Now that I'm more advanced in the language, I'm starting to…

Can you recommend any learning materials that were particularly useful to you?

Honestly the docs themselves are excellent https://elixir-lang.org/getting-started/introduction.html

Re: The BEAM Has Spoiled Me

#8
Article piqued my interest, but also left me scratching my head a bit - everything mentioned is kinda vague / abstract.

Elixir/BEAM are "better" but better than what? Curious the author's prior language experience.

What's he developing with it exactly? Native apps? Web stuff? Or just learning / experimenting?

Didn't really understand how the Elixir / BEAM approach is different from typical threads, OS processes, or async programming models - maybe asking too much from a short post :). But still would be interesting to have some specific examples of how Elixir/BEAM is better.

Re: The BEAM Has Spoiled Me

#9

The BEAM is great, but the Elixir language itself is really what spoiled me. After having written ruby for years, I really enjoy what the Elixir language has to offer. Pattern matching[0] and the pipe operator[1] eliminate a ton of intermediate variables. Functional programming took a while to get used to, but I'm really starting to like thinking immutably. Now that I'm more advanced in the language, I'm starting to…

Can you recommend any learning materials that were particularly useful to you?

The beam book: https://github.com/happi/theBeamBook
Post reply on HN