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Ten years without Elixir

blog.cretaria.com

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Re: Ten years without Elixir

#31

Post by dnautics »

aeturnum wrote: post #28
dnautics wrote: post #10

The pipe operator seems silly until you learn to pipe into IO.inspect. for vscoders I use this snippet ( https://slickb.it/bits/70 ) which also labels with the line numbers, meaning you can multiline select a bunch of lines in your pipeline and when you're done ninja them out with another multiline select (usually line numbers have the same number of characters around each other). In combination with triggering singl…

I think OP's point about building huge systems with pipes is well taken. They can become confusing when the break and over-use can be a code smell. Their power, as you point it, is in the ability to jump into any statement and add another action with minimal syntax. It's extremely useful while iterating on development because you can quickly check that something works (or check on what is happening).

I think it also encourages a declarative style of programming, so that's a win if you ask me, especially for large systems, though I can't measure this.

Re: Ten years without Elixir

#33

Post by crad »

mmcclure wrote: post #23

From the perspective of someone coming the other direction (a developer working almost entirely with Elixir that needed to jump to Erlang docs occasionally), it's interesting to see the note on docs, and honestly the vibe I get from this blog post feels related to my personal overall gripe with the Erlang community. To be blunt, I really dreaded needing to jump to the Erlang documentation, largely because of a percei…

I could see that, my biggest gripe with Erlang has always been around the "softer edges" - easy to grok tooling, easy to read documentation, etc.

And something to work on for sure.

Re: Ten years without Elixir

#34

Post by loveJesus »

Praise the Lord, to me the the person writing the article seemed to be making fun of himself a little bit. Like a disgruntled but loving grandpa who has his ways, acknowledging how some things elixir does may actually be better, giving a congratulations to his grandchild as the central point.

Re: Ten years without Elixir

#35

Post by desireco42 »

svrtknst wrote: post #21

In many cases, Erlang has a simplicity that is largely unmatched. I love the pipe operator and it's something I miss in a lot of languages, but just as often I miss the simple form of Erlang as well, being able to just define a series of simple, immutable clauses. In some sense, two ways to solve the same problem.

As someone who really love Elixir, I agree with you and share your sentiment.

I always found Erlang syntax, much different but once you get use to it, very simple.

Docs, on the other hand, truly not the greatest thing :).

Re: Ten years without Elixir

#36

Post by jolux »

aeturnum wrote: post #28
dnautics wrote: post #10

The pipe operator seems silly until you learn to pipe into IO.inspect. for vscoders I use this snippet ( https://slickb.it/bits/70 ) which also labels with the line numbers, meaning you can multiline select a bunch of lines in your pipeline and when you're done ninja them out with another multiline select (usually line numbers have the same number of characters around each other). In combination with triggering singl…

I think OP's point about building huge systems with pipes is well taken. They can become confusing when the break and over-use can be a code smell. Their power, as you point it, is in the ability to jump into any statement and add another action with minimal syntax. It's extremely useful while iterating on development because you can quickly check that something works (or check on what is happening).

If you’re chaining more than three or four things together I think you’re definitely doing something wrong but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen someone do that in Elixir.

Re: Ten years without Elixir

#37

Post by dnautics »

crad wrote: post #33
mmcclure wrote: post #23

From the perspective of someone coming the other direction (a developer working almost entirely with Elixir that needed to jump to Erlang docs occasionally), it's interesting to see the note on docs, and honestly the vibe I get from this blog post feels related to my personal overall gripe with the Erlang community. To be blunt, I really dreaded needing to jump to the Erlang documentation, largely because of a percei…

I could see that, my biggest gripe with Erlang has always been around the "softer edges" - easy to grok tooling, easy to read documentation, etc. And something to work on for sure.

A lot of these things are made more difficult due to lexical substitution as it's metaprogramming primitive.

Re: Ten years without Elixir

#38

Post by _nothing »

honkycat wrote: post #24

Re: Pipe operator Their argument for replacing the pipe operator is to do this instead: foo(X) -> final_function(maybe_function(X)). into this: foo(X) -> Maybe = maybe_function(X), final_function(Maybe). instead of this: x |> maybe_function() |> final_function() Their exact words: Spelling things out so pedantically makes code dead-simple & clear. Yes, there is a tad more code, but you will also note that nothing is…

Yeah, I went on to read that post and also didn't quite understand their reasoning.

It seems to me that one of the benefits of the pipe operator is that it very clearly lays out the steps involved, aka

  x
  |> maybe_function()
  |> final_function()
so that the code is dead-simple and clear. It doesn't seem nested in the say way that final_function(maybe_function(X)) is.

Granted, I don't have nearly the level of experience of the author so I can't say for sure, but it seems to me like they just haven't had enough experience with the pipe operator to see how it benefits the code "beauty".

Re: Ten years without Elixir

#39

Post by ogre_codes »

_nothing wrote: post #26

Content aside, I don't get why people keep criticizing the site design, and I say that as a frontend dev. This appears to be the personal blog of a lone Erlang developer-- why should they put in effort to make bring it up to current design standards? It does what it's designed to do. It conveys information in a simple, readable way, same as HN itself. IMO there's nothing worth criticizing here. edit: typo

> bring it up to current design standards?

I'm curious what makes this an out-of-date design. Did easy to read go out of style at some point?

As far as I'm concerned this is the purest form of a text based blog. Pure content, decent font, Good contrast, no bullshit popups or animations to distract from the point.

Re: Ten years without Elixir

#40

Post by jolux »

I get the sense that the author resents the popularity of Elixir on some level. Personally I appreciate that it removes boilerplate from Erlang and has a real macro system. I’m not picky about syntax in general but when verbosity can be eliminated I think it’s almost always a good idea.

As for his opinion on the pipe operator, I have to wonder what he thinks of do-notation and point free style in Haskell, let alone APL and its ilk.

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