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Ten years without Elixir

blog.cretaria.com

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Re: Ten years without Elixir

#61

Post by rlander »

Grimm1 wrote: post #7

Erlang's VM is great, Erlang the language isn't imo. Elixir just did it better imo and this person seemingly can't stand that people seem to like it more. Let people like the things they like :P I'm really not sure this needed a blog post.

> Elixir just did it better imo and this person seemingly can't stand that people seem to like it more.

The post does read more like venting than a structured critique, but a few of his points are still valid.

Every time I hear someone praising Elixir, it's never about some Elixir-specific feature but usually about something that Erlang has provided for ages like pattern matching, lightweight processes, supervisors, the preemptive scheduler. Given this, I'm sure you can appreciate how bittersweet this can be for an Erlang developer.

To me Elixir is just a more complex, verbose and less elegant version of Erlang so it kinda frustrates me when newcomers would rather learn Elixir than plain Erlang.

Re: Ten years without Elixir

#62

Post by jacquesm »

hinkley wrote: post #42
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…

> Without active pushback from a dedicated member of the core team, such things usually end in utter chaos.

That may well be true, but Erlang is actually the opposite of utter chaos, it is extremely well designed, organized and implemented and battle hardened to a degree that would put most FOSS projects to shame.

Re: Ten years without Elixir

#63

Post by whelming_wave »

jacquesm wrote: post #62
hinkley wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Without active pushback from a dedicated member of the core team, such things usually end in utter chaos. That may well be true, but Erlang is actually the opposite of utter chaos, it is extremely well designed, organized and implemented and battle hardened to a degree that would put most FOSS projects to shame.

My reading was that they were saying the documentation would end in utter chaos, not the project as a whole.

Re: Ten years without Elixir

#64

Post by buzzerbetrayed »

richardfey wrote: post #2

This must be the most unflattering congratulations I have ever read. Sounds to me like Elixir should feel guilty of being successful despite not being Erlang.

Agreed. This article was very off putting to me. And felt like someone complaining about something without taking the time to learn the something first. Probably because that’s what it was.

> I feel as though this operator could be a detriment, or at least come with some prickily moral hazards

I don’t care about how you “feel” about elixir, or how it “could” be. Take the time to learn it, then speak to what it _is_.

Re: Ten years without Elixir

#65

Post by owl57 »

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.

Looks like Haskell-like do notation would be helpful.

Re: Ten years without Elixir

#66

Post by djur »

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…

This reminds me of the attitude held by some Go developers (and Rob Pike) that the reason people want map/filter/reduce and similar generic functions on containers is because they want "less code", and the counter is that a for loop is "more explicit", "clearer", "less magical", and so on.

But for someone who is used to languages where these constructs (or list comprehensions) are idiomatic, they are perfectly clear and explicit, and using a for loop instead adds complexity.

Re: Ten years without Elixir

#67

Post by enraged_camel »

eterm wrote: post #25
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…

It's like 2000's MSDN vs current MSDN. The erlang documentation tells you what you need to know and is accurate but it isn't helpful in the way it should be. If you already know what you're doing, it can be a useful reference, but it doesn't aid understanding.

In other words, it's a spec sheet, which is useful for people who are already experts in the language. Beginners and intermediates, on the other hand, need it to be something more like a textbook: something that contain not just the technical details, but also commentary and examples about them that tie them to "real life" scenarios.

Re: Ten years without Elixir

#68

Post by rlander »

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…

Well I believe that no pipe is better than a a handicapped pipe operator.

The Elixir implementation inverts the classical order of piping last in functional languages to the detriment of it. IMO a language should either support pipe last AND currying by default or supply a multitude of thread operators like Clojure does (->, ->>, as->, etc). Elixir's is just middle-of-the-road-weird.

Re: Ten years without Elixir

#69

Post by ianbutler »

rlander wrote: post #61
Grimm1 wrote: post #7

Erlang's VM is great, Erlang the language isn't imo. Elixir just did it better imo and this person seemingly can't stand that people seem to like it more. Let people like the things they like :P I'm really not sure this needed a blog post.

> Elixir just did it better imo and this person seemingly can't stand that people seem to like it more. The post does read more like venting than a structured critique, but a few of his points are still valid. Every time I hear someone praising Elixir, it's never about some Elixir-specific feature but usually about something that Erlang has provided for ages like pattern matching, lightweight processes, supervisors,…

I legitimately could not get passed the choice of syntax, module organization etc. I believe many people feel the same way. Verbosity is good imo, languages are read more than written and Erlang is too terse for me. I love Erlang conceptually and I love that Elixir made it accessible to me because I otherwise would have just avoided the Erlang ecosystem all together and would have gone with Go, the thought of which makes me shudder because I am not a fan there. I can completely understand it being bittersweet and not that I knowingly represent a majority but I suspect many people think the same way I do in regards to writing in Erlang. To me terse != elegant and I find Elixir goes the mile for me there in what I do find elegant.

Re: Ten years without Elixir

#70

Post by davidw »

I didn't get a lot from this article, despite being in similar circumstances. I have a lot of Erlang experience - and I'd love to jump into Elixir, and I think Jose got a lot of things right with it. It's not just a "nicer" syntax - things like strings got fixed up.
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