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Elixir – The next big language for the web

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Re: Elixir – The next big language for the web

#61

Post by pron »

lectrick wrote: post #59
pron wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been developing software for about twenty years now (as well as overseeing teams of developers), and at one point or another I needed each of the things I mentioned. I have never, however, been required to implement any of them using a functional style (or any other specific style for that matter). And if you like learning languages, that's great (I do too, from time to time), but I find algorithms to be so much…

Well, there's probably a few things going on. One is that, without much fail, I seem to be able to pick the winners of the next horse race in technology. I don't know if it's some kind of sensation of some kind of powerful embryological energy of tech ideas or what, but I sometimes see that things might go in a certain way, and I am usually correct. :) (Ruby I spotted REALLY early. When Rails came out I knew it was g…

> So there's basically room for everyone, the algorithmists, the language hipsters, and everyone else. ;)

Oh, absolutely. But I'd keep language hipsters away from important software (although any language built on a solid foundation like BEAM or the JVM is a much safer bet than one that isn't). :)

> I seem to be able to pick the winners of the next horse race in technology... Ruby

Wait, you consider Ruby a winning horse? I hear it's a fun language -- probably a great one -- but it's already beginning to fade after hardly having left a mark on anything but web apps (a very small portion of the software industry, and the least technological). If we coldly consider results I think it hardly qualifies as more than a relatively extended fad. It's not even nearly as popular as Delphi was in its heyday, let alone top-ten languages like Java, C, C++, C#, PHP, VB and JavaScript. In fact, I think that of all languages that could be considered Ruby competitors, Ruby has done the worst (it never threatened PHP's dominance in its field and was easily overtaken by Python -- which has been used in many more domains).

Fads are often self-fulfilling prophecies, often gaining brief popularity on sheer novelty alone; but important codebases last for decades. And don't mistake the tiny Silicon Valley software startup scene for a representative of the software industry. Most software developers in the world have never even heard of HN.

Re: Elixir – The next big language for the web

#62

Post by subsection1h »

pron wrote: post #61
lectrick wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, there's probably a few things going on. One is that, without much fail, I seem to be able to pick the winners of the next horse race in technology. I don't know if it's some kind of sensation of some kind of powerful embryological energy of tech ideas or what, but I sometimes see that things might go in a certain way, and I am usually correct. :) (Ruby I spotted REALLY early. When Rails came out I knew it was g…

> So there's basically room for everyone, the algorithmists, the language hipsters, and everyone else. ;) Oh, absolutely. But I'd keep language hipsters away from important software (although any language built on a solid foundation like BEAM or the JVM is a much safer bet than one that isn't). :) > I seem to be able to pick the winners of the next horse race in technology... Ruby Wait, you consider Ruby a winning ho…

> Wait, you consider Ruby a winning horse? I hear it's a fun language -- probably a great one -- but it's already beginning to fade [...] it never threatened PHP's dominance

If a winning horse is one that earns the rider more money (while also being more fun to ride!), then for me and all the Ruby devs I know, Ruby is a winning horse compared to PHP.

> important codebases last for decades.

Yes, and the author did well to avoid naming their article "Elixir - The next big language for important codebases that will last for decades". :-)

Re: Elixir – The next big language for the web

#63

Post by yellowapple »

pbowyer wrote: post #49
pawelkowal wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Erlang's module system means that a chunk of the raison d'etre behind language-specific package managers is already alleviated. Sure, modules provide a way to "package" functions, but that is 5% of what a package manager does. Being able to distribute, fetch and do dependency resolution is certainly the bulk of it. I definitely prefer my deployments to rely on packages than fetching git repositories from Github and…

> Sure, modules provide a way to "package" functions, but that is 5% of what a package manager does. Being able to distribute, fetch and do dependency resolution is certainly the bulk of it. Please God the Erlang/Elixir community don't invent another package manager. Pip, easy_install, gem, npm, composer, bundler, bower, maven and all the others I don't know about - we've got enough as users to remember the variation…

You're too late ;)

Maybe someday someone will just create one package manager to rule them all, one that's not tied to a specific language, but can instead manage anything running on your computer.

Oh, wait.

Re: Elixir – The next big language for the web

#64

Post by yellowapple »

filereaper wrote: post #28

I've been monitoring Elixir on HN for a while now, looks like an interesting direction to take. I wanted to know which direction Elixir is going to take? Will Elixir be mostly compatible enough with Ruby so that Rails can run directly off on Elixir? Is there a plan to change Rails enough to run on Elixir? How does the community feel about Elixir? I'm certainly interested in the concurrency aspects of Elixir (ie. no G…

> Will Elixir be mostly compatible enough with Ruby so that Rails can run directly off on Elixir?

Most likely not. However, it might be possible to run Ruby programs in OTP-style supervision trees, thus managed by a supervisor written in Erlang or Elixir of LFE or some other BEAM-based language and thus made able to leverage some or all of the advantages of Erlang (a good potential proof-of-concept would be a replacement for Puma or Unicorn or Passenger - in other words, a Rack-compatible web server (or wrapper around an existing web server, like Cowboy) written in Elixir or Erlang or LFE or what have you).

> Is there a plan to change Rails enough to run on Elixir?

Also most likely not; most of the Rails community is currently heavily dependent on the Ruby ecosystem, and there's not really much of a point in changing that.

That isn't to say that there's no place for Elixir in a Rails development framework; there are plenty of Rails shops that use Erlang for dispatching requests to Rails instances (I believe Github is one such shop).

> How does the community feel about Elixir?

The Elixir community obviously feels elated :)

The Ruby/Rails crowd is a bit harder to read. I personally work for a Rails consultancy, and right now my coworkers don't seem universally interested in it quite yet. That may change in the future, though, especially as more folks realize the merits of using Elixir and Ruby side-by-side and more packages (whether from the Ruby side or the Elixir/Erlang side) are developed to allow easy communication between those two worlds.

The Erlang community seems to be mildly positive about it. At least one of Erlang's original creators has expressed a modestly-positive opinion of Elixir's direction (with a particular excitement about Elixir's Clojure-inspired "|>" (pipe) operator - something that a lot of Elixirists seem to like using, myself included). There's some deviation from the more Erlangy ways of doing things, however, and it's not as mature as Erlang itself, so (from what I understand based on my observations of the Erlang community - particularly mailing lists and conference recordings/transcripts) there's still a bit of resistance there.

Re: Elixir – The next big language for the web

#65

Post by btbuildem »

vezzy-fnord wrote: post #18

I think part of it is that with Erlang it is not as easy to get up and running with a new website. I'm doing this at present and there is no special difficulty. And things like package management, build tools, meta-programming, unicode handling and web frameworks are not as straight forward as in languages such as Ruby. Erlang's module system means that a chunk of the raison d'etre behind language-specific package ma…

Agreed - as simple as setting up yaws (which comes with a templating language built in!)

Re: Elixir – The next big language for the web

#67

Post by laut »

vezzy-fnord wrote: post #37
laut wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I wrote "not as easy" I did not mean simply difficult. It just takes a bit more work with Erlang. As for Erlang string handling: [175,95,40,12484,41,95,47,175] ;) The good thing is that Erlang and Elixir can benefit from each other. For instance https://hex.pm which is made in Elixir, but can also be used for Erlang projects.

My point was to ask for clarification as to what said work entails and how it's larger than, e.g. Ruby or another mainstream platform for web applications.

I just tried running Chicago Boss. I followed the quick start guide that had a lot of steps and managed to get a 404 error.

With Rails there are less steps: gem install rails && rails new path/to/your/new/application && cd path/to/your/new/application && rails server and you just point your browser to http://localhost:3000 and get a nice welcome page for your new skeleton app.

Chicago Boss could be improved in that respect.

Re: Elixir – The next big language for the web

#68

Post by ab5tract »

lectrick wrote: post #22
sergiotapia wrote: post #10

I think the next big thing is Meteor. Here's why: 1. Real-time baked in. 2. Uses Javascript (tons and tons of developers know at least enough to use Meteor) 3. Sane templating engine. 4. Same wow effect I had when I first started Rails. 5. Fantastic build system. Pheonix and Elixir may be the bees knees, but unfortunately because it uses a functional language, it drastically cuts down the mindshare of developers. I d…

> but unfortunately because it uses a functional language, it drastically cuts down the mindshare of developers. I don't even know any developers in real life that use functional languages. 1) Once upon a time, almost no one used object oriented languages except for Smalltalk weirdos. 2) Ruby, javascript and a host of other languages have "functional" features. Does your language have a "lambda" feature, where you ca…

Right...

Another fad brought up for the sheer fashionability of it.

Saying "mutable state is bad" is just as inane as saying "immutability is bad". There are tradeoffs for either. There is absolutely no reason to pretend that one trumps the other in all cases.

Other than looking cool to your peers, I guess.

Re: Elixir – The next big language for the web

#70

Post by pron »

subsection1h wrote: post #62
pron wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So there's basically room for everyone, the algorithmists, the language hipsters, and everyone else. ;) Oh, absolutely. But I'd keep language hipsters away from important software (although any language built on a solid foundation like BEAM or the JVM is a much safer bet than one that isn't). :) > I seem to be able to pick the winners of the next horse race in technology... Ruby Wait, you consider Ruby a winning ho…

> Wait, you consider Ruby a winning horse? I hear it's a fun language -- probably a great one -- but it's already beginning to fade [...] it never threatened PHP's dominance If a winning horse is one that earns the rider more money (while also being more fun to ride!), then for me and all the Ruby devs I know, Ruby is a winning horse compared to PHP. > important codebases last for decades. Yes, and the author did wel…

> ... then for me and all the Ruby devs I know, Ruby is a winning horse compared to PHP.

That's true.

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