Elixir for Humans Who Know Python

Elixir today is used by startups, unicorns, fortune 500, and at least two of the FAANG (for whatever it is worth). It is used for web apps, embedded, distributed systems, data processing, and making inroads on AI and machine learning. It has a vibrant community with events around the world, several dozens books, and more.

It is on the [top quadrant of Redmonk][0] and [top 25 on most GitHub language stats][1] while being the second youngest language there (only older than Swift which was created by Apple).

Considering it is a language standing on the shoulder of giants but started by a 30-person company, I would say we definitely made it (I am obviously biased!). Of course there is _a lot_ to improve, realistically speaking it is unlikely we will cross top 10 (maybe that's your definition of "make it") but I also want to be clear that we will be here for quite a while!

  0: https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2022/10/20/language-rankings-6-22/
  1: https://madnight.github.io/githut/#/pull_requests/2022/4

The real problem with them is that while you and I might be interested in functional languages, our coworkers/managers aren't and we have to stick with the languages we might not find as immediately exciting, like python.

Side node, python has Hy (https://hylang.org), which is essentially a lisp implementation that compiles to Python's AST. The entire python ecosystem and stdlib is available to Hy, so it's as batteries included as python is. It's a blast to use, but similarly I wouldn't expect my job to be excited about it.

At the risk of speaking for people other than myself, a lot of people don't want to write code in JS and if they don't have to, they won't. Frameworks/tools like Phoenix and HTMX or the fact that many languages can compile to javascript/wasm mirrors this opinion

I like to use things like filter, map, reduce or list comprehensions, but I see very few of those in my coworkers' code bases.

When Python introduced pattern matching, it was rather a pattern-aware switch/case, which does not return a value, as such a construct in a functional programming would do.

> I went from Ruby to Elixir, and even with my basic Clojure experience, it was an effort.

I tried out Elixir twice so far, and since the last time, I worked through 300 pages of SICP. I still have to twist my mind when I'd like to process nested maps or the like in Elixir now.

> It was worth it, but I think the apparently similarity of Elixir to Ruby is actually a negative.

However, Ruby provides a lot of higher-order functions, such as group_by and the like. If you're used to functional-style Ruby code, the transition is easier.

Honestly at that point probably don't be using python. ORM objects don't use slots, they use a hashmap to look up everything every time, and probably that hashmap points to a method that points to another hashmap that points to some kind of data structure.

If you're worried about that than django probably is not for you. That being said it scales out very nicely, you probably are not loading dozens of thousands of entries in to memory at once but are instead using a celery distributed task queue. If you did need to load that much in to memory for some reason (presumably some kind of data science?) You can use the `in_bulk("field1","field2","etc")` query option to return raw data as dictionaries/lists instead of ORM objects. You don't get the benefit of ORM methods but you're not instantiating an ORM object for every row and probably for that kind of thing you're better off taking a more functional approach any way.

Basically if you're worried about how much memory your data is going to take up you probably shouldn't be using django, hacking __slots__ or other memory efficient stuff into the django ORM is going to be tricky. In that case ignore the ORM and just construct your own objects directly or use something better suited for that.