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Ten years without Elixir

blog.cretaria.com

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Re: Ten years without Elixir

#41

Post by dnautics »

jolux wrote: post #36
aeturnum wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not an antipattern for nimble_parsec: https://github.com/ityonemo/zigler/blob/fe845a9fbbfef92da8ab...

Plus think of how much easier that pipe makes it for you to understand what is going on.

Re: Ten years without Elixir

#42

Post by hinkley »

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've found that in general the longer someone has been on a project, the worse their documentation is.

People who have both deep practical knowledge of a domain and can explain it clearly are so rare that we tend to remember them by name. Experts can bitch all they want about how Neil deGrasse Tyson isn't a 'real astrophysicist', but lets see you try to talk to the general public, or for that matter, college students starting their senior year as undergrads in your field. Then lets have them frankly rate you on your lack of accessibility, tendency to circular reasoning, overuse of jargon, and complete lack of patience... We'll call it the head-up-own-ass quotient.

Erlang is a very, very old project, with a historically high degree of echo chamber going on. Without active pushback from a dedicated member of the core team, such things usually end in utter chaos. It is less likely that you will achieve understanding by reading documentation of that sort, than that you will accidentally summon an eldritch horror by reading it aloud and not being very precise with your pronunciation.

Re: Ten years without Elixir

#43

Post by generalk »

eitland wrote: post #16
hans1729 wrote: post #8

This might, impressively, be the worst Webdesign I ever saw

[x] Readable [x] Loaded fast [x] No moving parts [x] Don't mess with scroll [x] No autoplaying videos No, it definitely isn't the worst I've seen.

I gotta put a big, giant X next to "Readable."

I have HN at 170% zoom right now. I keep most of my font sizes around 14pt minimum. I have one useless eye and another that isn't so great even corrected with contact lenses.

Give me more web design trends that emphasize fonts at a readable size AND color contrast with the background color. Dark gray Calibri Thin on a light gray background might impress some design nerds but I'll take large, margined, justified text well set from its background any day of the week.

Re: Ten years without Elixir

#44

Post by cultofmetatron »

jolux wrote: post #36
aeturnum wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

the entire ecto api is built upon chaining statements together. I have a few queries that are 8-10 statements long.

Re: Ten years without Elixir

#45

Post by _nothing »

ogre_codes wrote: post #39
_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.

> I'm curious what makes this an out-of-date design.

I'm not a designer myself but the things that strike me immediately are that the fonts and colors seem out of fashion and the site looks somewhat awkward on mobile. But that's my whole point. You wouldn't want those things on the homepage of a startup, but this isn't that. It's just a simple blog and it does a good job of being a simple blog.

Re: Ten years without Elixir

#46

Post by jolux »

dnautics wrote: post #41
jolux wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not an antipattern for nimble_parsec: https://github.com/ityonemo/zigler/blob/fe845a9fbbfef92da8ab... Plus think of how much easier that pipe makes it for you to understand what is going on.

That’s a very beautiful usage of it. I hadn’t thought of it as a way to construct DSLs, but it makes a lot of sense here.

Re: Ten years without Elixir

#47

Post by jolux »

cultofmetatron wrote: post #44
jolux wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

the entire ecto api is built upon chaining statements together. I have a few queries that are 8-10 statements long.

Good point, I don’t use Ecto so I wasn’t aware of this.

Re: Ten years without Elixir

#48

Post by ogre_codes »

_nothing wrote: post #45
ogre_codes wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> I'm curious what makes this an out-of-date design. I'm not a designer myself but the things that strike me immediately are that the fonts and colors seem out of fashion and the site looks somewhat awkward on mobile. But that's my whole point. You wouldn't want those things on the homepage of a startup, but this isn't that. It's just a simple blog and it does a good job of being a simple blog.

> site looks somewhat awkward on mobile

Ah... yeah I'm on my desktop right now so didn't even think about that. I don't love the colors/ fonts or justification, but they also don't interfere with readability which is my #1 criteria for evaluating a site.

Re: Ten years without Elixir

#49

Post by nickjj »

dnautics wrote: post #27
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 onboarded a python dev onto elixir and he complained that elixir docs don't look like python docs, so it must be to some degree a matter of taste. I gotta say I don't hate the official erlang docs, they're not terrible. The state of documentation in erlang libraries , though, is frankly atrocious. Even libraries that had their genesis in elixir (like telemetry) are basically unbearable to read. I wish at least ther…

> I onboarded a python dev onto elixir and he complained that elixir docs don't look like python docs, so it must be to some degree a matter of taste.

As someone who also came from Python I can't say I'm a fan of Elixir's docs either.

I often find myself having to externally search for Elixir / Phoenix resources and when you compare Python vs Elixir in that regard it's no contest. Almost every web dev problem you could think of is solved in Python with tons of examples, practical applications, blog posts, YouTube videos and the raw docs themselves. You'll almost certainly find high quality code you can at least work off of.

Where as with Elixir I find myself hitting dead ends in a lot of places and the docs often don't have enough details or context to understand something unless you're already an expert in which case you wouldn't need the docs. There's often 1 liners that expect you to have an understanding of the language that rivals its creator.

At the end of the day it's not really about the literal documentation. It's how fast you can go from being stuck to unstuck and walking away with understanding how you got from stuck to unstuck.

Re: Ten years without Elixir

#50

Post by mmcclure »

nickjj wrote: post #49
dnautics wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I onboarded a python dev onto elixir and he complained that elixir docs don't look like python docs, so it must be to some degree a matter of taste. I gotta say I don't hate the official erlang docs, they're not terrible. The state of documentation in erlang libraries , though, is frankly atrocious. Even libraries that had their genesis in elixir (like telemetry) are basically unbearable to read. I wish at least ther…

> I onboarded a python dev onto elixir and he complained that elixir docs don't look like python docs, so it must be to some degree a matter of taste. As someone who also came from Python I can't say I'm a fan of Elixir's docs either. I often find myself having to externally search for Elixir / Phoenix resources and when you compare Python vs Elixir in that regard it's no contest. Almost every web dev problem you cou…

I'd argue you're not commenting on any specific language at all here, but rather the sheer size of the community/user base for a given language.
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