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Elixir-lang.org has a new design

elixir-lang.org

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Re: Elixir-lang.org has a new design

#41

Post by [deleted] »

ModernMech wrote: post #26
josevalim wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Software Mansion folks designed it and we actually iterated on the designs on Figma, having discussions as humans, and exploring alternatives. They were lovely to work with. I also worked on all of the copy myself, collecting feedback from core maintainers as I went. The new tagline was a suggestion from Theo which we iterated on. I did use LLMs as an assistant, but I did not ask it to generate the content. Might…

Shame then that despite all that, they landed on the same design used by every "I asked an LLM to make me a language and a website this weekend here's what it spit out" project. I mean, I'm not saying it looks bad or is a bad result. Just it's very similar to other things that have put in much less effort.

[deleted]

Re: Elixir-lang.org has a new design

#42

Post by pluralmonad »

phplovesong wrote: post #25

I guess elixir is a nice lang for the niche of erlang. But its dynamic (the "type system" is really meh at best) its not suited for real world use. If i go full dynamic, why not use pure erlang instead?

Maybe try and build something and see for yourself? Saying elixir is not fit for real world use shows how little experience with it you have.

Re: Elixir-lang.org has a new design

#43

Post by ia »

ModernMech wrote: post #26
josevalim wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Software Mansion folks designed it and we actually iterated on the designs on Figma, having discussions as humans, and exploring alternatives. They were lovely to work with. I also worked on all of the copy myself, collecting feedback from core maintainers as I went. The new tagline was a suggestion from Theo which we iterated on. I did use LLMs as an assistant, but I did not ask it to generate the content. Might…

Shame then that despite all that, they landed on the same design used by every "I asked an LLM to make me a language and a website this weekend here's what it spit out" project. I mean, I'm not saying it looks bad or is a bad result. Just it's very similar to other things that have put in much less effort.

I’m tried to understand the motivation for this salty comment and the parent comment. I failed. Then I opened the user’s comment history and most of their comments are like this. ModernMech, please, keep in mind we’re all doing our best. Being passive aggressive on the internet is social pollution. No offense intended, I’m just hoping you reflect a bit next time before you post.

Re: Elixir-lang.org has a new design

#46

Post by toast0 »

zuzululu wrote: post #30

I appreciate Elixir but the problem is the job market/talent pool is tiny compared to other existing languages. If you buy into the Elixir stack then you now have constraint you could've avoided entirely by avoiding it. Also for devs there seems to be no premium offered for this talent pool scarcity. With LLMs I think language-specialists are redundant in a large scheme of things. ex) at one of my current remote jobs…

> appreciate Elixir but the problem is the job market/talent pool is tiny compared to other existing languages.

> I shipped an entire telecom infrastructure with barely knowing Elixir and we brought on contractors to audit the code and they found no issues.

Erlang/Elixir experience is rare, because it's not widely used and the teams are small. It's not worth trying to hire for it. Hire for people who can figure it out on the go (amd are willing to give it a try).

You did it, hire other people who seem likely to be able to.

Re: Elixir-lang.org has a new design

#47

Post by alberth »

josevalim wrote: post #19
alberth wrote: post #5

Elixir is great. OT: I wish more funding & development effort went into BEAM itself on making it more performant. Note: I’m not talking concurrency. I’m talking pure raw performance. Seems like it’s been a one person show for over a decade on making it faster.

There are multiple people working on the JIT within the last 5-6 years. The WhatsApp folks also contribute meaningfully. I suspect once the Erlang/OTP team squeezes all performance in the JIT, they will look into optimizing across modules, which will probably open up many new possibilities, but it requires rethinking some runtime primitives.

Hi Jose

You’re an inspiration for many. Thank you.

I’m curious to know what your top 3 hopes for BEAM itself are for the coming years (in any area that you think would make it better).

Re: Elixir-lang.org has a new design

#48

Post by toast0 »

losvedir wrote: post #8

To me, it seems one of the killer use cases for Elixir (/Erlang) is its distributed cluster capability. Does anyone have experience with that or case reports to share? I've used Elixir quite a bit professionally, but mostly as just a "nicer Rails" with horizontally scalable but otherwise independent Phoenix apps in your traditional Kubernetes setup, which seems to me to kind of missing out on its main purpose.

It's been a while, but I used to work at WhatsApp and we used Erlang distribution heavily. I understand the clusters have gotten really huge since I left.

It's super handy. There's no security barrier between nodes. It's a headache if your network is unreliable.

For a chat app, messaging someone becomes a series of steps:

a) look up if they're online (send a message to the presence database service)

b) if you got a process id back, that's the process connected to the user, so send it the message. The process could be on the same machine or not, but the sending api is the same. This is the special part: few other environments make arbitrary messaging between processes/threads/tasks/whathaveyou so pervasive.

c) if you don't get a process id back, the user is offline; send the message to the offline database.

Re: Elixir-lang.org has a new design

#50

Post by josevalim »

alberth wrote: post #47
josevalim wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are multiple people working on the JIT within the last 5-6 years. The WhatsApp folks also contribute meaningfully. I suspect once the Erlang/OTP team squeezes all performance in the JIT, they will look into optimizing across modules, which will probably open up many new possibilities, but it requires rethinking some runtime primitives.

Hi Jose You’re an inspiration for many. Thank you. I’m curious to know what your top 3 hopes for BEAM itself are for the coming years (in any area that you think would make it better).

Thanks for the kind words and the nice question!

1. The cross module optimizations I mentioned above 2. Have a WASM target for the runtime itself 3. Make it easier to ship single file executables with the whole VM

But they are really “nice-to-have”s. I have been a happy user for 15+ years!

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