Elixir-lang.org has a new design • Hacker News Board

Re: Elixir-lang.org has a new design

#121

Post by asa400 » Sun, Jul 19, 2026, 4:49 AM UTC

listic wrote: post #114

hybridcivic182 wrote: post #40

José Valim & team have made such an incredible language and ecosystem. thank you for all the faithful work, especially the run up to 1.20 over this past year

I heard from a fan of Erlang that Elixir was made by people who don't really understand Erlang who reworked it/BEAM to be in the style of Ruby; that made it popular even though it's an abomination. What do you think?

It's nonsense. The people who made Elixir understand Erlang and the BEAM as well as anyone on earth. Elixir and Erlang have different syntax but aren't even that semantically different. Contrast this with say, Java and Clojure. Clojure is significantly different than Java both in terms of what idiomatic code is, as well as how the average developer understands and uses their tools day-to-day. (Obviously they both run on the same VM, the JVM, which is why this comparison works.)

Elixir has some semantic "userspace"-level differences from Erlang (Elixir has protocols, macros, defaults to strings as binaries rather than strings as charlists, among other things) but they are much more similar than they are different. Both are on BEAM, both expression-based languages, both use processes for concurrency, have immutable data, use pattern matching for control flow, rely heavily on OTP, deploy with releases, share (or build on) the same datastructures, have the same performance characteristics, etc. If you know Elixir you pretty much already know Erlang modulo the time it takes to learn Erlang's syntax.

Re: Elixir-lang.org has a new design

#122

Post by travisgriggs » Sun, Jul 19, 2026, 6:03 AM UTC

dmpk2k wrote: post #9

ch4s3 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s pretty hard to make things like math faster for real world use cases in a bytecode interpreter.

It's a JIT nowadays. Admittedly an extremely simple one, to minimize compile times and maintenance overhead. You can get substantial performance improvements by using guards though. See what Wings3D does with is_float() everywhere in hot numeric-heavy code.

Can you elaborate why adding guards makes things faster?

Re: Elixir-lang.org has a new design

#123

Post by aeonfox » Sun, Jul 19, 2026, 6:10 AM UTC

syspec wrote: post #108

I waited for an great editing expert before trying elixir, that never came... But, now with LLMs I don't have to fear a loosely typed language, I'd love to give it another go.

> loosely typed

Minor nitpick: I believe Elixir and Erlang are strongly typed languages, but for a long time they have both been dynamically typed. With v1.20, Elixir is well on its way to transitioning to a gradually static typed language, and to-date has done so almost purely through inference (except for guards which can explicitly specify type information)

Re: Elixir-lang.org has a new design

#124

Post by radialstub » Sun, Jul 19, 2026, 6:14 AM UTC

listic wrote: post #114

hybridcivic182 wrote: post #40

José Valim & team have made such an incredible language and ecosystem. thank you for all the faithful work, especially the run up to 1.20 over this past year

I heard from a fan of Erlang that Elixir was made by people who don't really understand Erlang who reworked it/BEAM to be in the style of Ruby; that made it popular even though it's an abomination. What do you think?

Joe Armstrong, one of the creators of erlang: "Dave loves Elixir, I think it's pretty cool, I think we're going to have fun together."

Re: Elixir-lang.org has a new design

#125

Post by josefrichter » Sun, Jul 19, 2026, 6:20 AM UTC

BEAM, the Elixir runtime, happens to be the perfect choice for agents and orchestration of multi-agent systems. I’ve written about it e.g. here https://josefrichter.design/blog/crowd

Re: Elixir-lang.org has a new design

#126

Post by bmitc » Sun, Jul 19, 2026, 6:28 AM UTC

listic wrote: post #114

hybridcivic182 wrote: post #40

José Valim & team have made such an incredible language and ecosystem. thank you for all the faithful work, especially the run up to 1.20 over this past year

I heard from a fan of Erlang that Elixir was made by people who don't really understand Erlang who reworked it/BEAM to be in the style of Ruby; that made it popular even though it's an abomination. What do you think?

Elixir, the language, is still basically Erlang with some niceties. The main Ruby influences are the syntax, which I don't love but can't say I hate, macros, which Erlang doesn't have, and large web-frameworks like Phoenix.

Elixir is a wonderful language and one of my favorite languages.

> Elixir was made by people who don't really understand Erlang

And this is definitely not true.

Re: Elixir-lang.org has a new design

#127

Post by Joel_Mckay » Sun, Jul 19, 2026, 7:38 AM UTC

asp_hornet wrote: post #105

I picked up Elixir this year. I’m gobsmacked on what the language and BEAM offer. Such a slept on ecosystem. I’m full convert. New site looks great.

Erlang ran multi-billion dollar market cap telecom companies for decades. Elixir just made Erlang easier to learn, and yes they replace a lot of cluster bodges at scale.

Does rapid cross-platform deployments with single code-base ease, and with Phoenix channels is very economical =3

https://quasar.dev/introduction-to-quasar/

Re: Elixir-lang.org has a new design

#128

Post by phplovesong » Sun, Jul 19, 2026, 8:11 AM UTC

pluralmonad wrote: post #42

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.

I tried it, and it brings little. It got new syntax, but syntax alone is not important. I can build with erlang, so why would i pick elixir? I used erlang for almost 20 years, and never saw the idea of elixir.

Gleam on the other hand has a actual type system. It still young but i can see what it offers.

So syntax for me is totally pointless and just noise.

Re: Elixir-lang.org has a new design

#129

Post by phplovesong » Sun, Jul 19, 2026, 8:13 AM UTC

ch4s3 wrote: post #32

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?

Have you tried it since the new type system rolled out?

Yes. It feel unergonomic and bolted on. I rather have a pure static type system, or a full dynamic language.

Re: Elixir-lang.org has a new design

#130

Post by phplovesong » Sun, Jul 19, 2026, 8:14 AM UTC

dnautics wrote: post #55

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?

> not suited for real world use. I hope you don't use discord or rely on pagerduty.

Dont use discord, never have. It could be just as easily be built in vanilla. Its just a chat really. Nothing special.