The fact that it's a dynamic language make problems similar to Node / Python, can't dev serious backend services without a strongly type language. Not saying you can't, but you will have a lot of issues overtime that would have been catch at compile time.
Lovely Week with Elixir
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Re: Lovely Week with Elixir
#12The fact that it's a dynamic language make problems similar to Node / Python, can't dev serious backend services without a strongly type language. Not saying you can't, but you will have a lot of issues overtime that would have been catch at compile time.
Elixir is a relatively strongly typed language, but it's not statically typed.
Re: Lovely Week with Elixir
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
Dude, LiveView is wild . It feels kind of magical, and I think people are gonna start adopting slowly, then all at once. There's an awesome blog post on their website. where Chris McCord, creator of Phoenix, builds a real-time Twitter clone in 15 minutes. https://www.phoenixframework.org/blog/build-a-real-time-twit...
God I hope so. I loved Erlang and OTP when I tried it back in the late 00s and it never really caught on, despite many of its strong points being what most websites would look for. Hopefully with the focus on the web and the fresh coat of paint Elixir has given the ecosystem it will eventually gain more adoption. But I still have my doubts because despite looking more mainstream than Erlang, it's still kind of a "fun…
Yeah, it does have that stigma. It certainly did for me;
"Why the hell are there colons before these variables..?"
It's funny how much the first languages you learn (for lots of people, Java/C/JS) have such an impact on what "feels weird," when every programming language is basically magic anyway.
Re: Lovely Week with Elixir
#14The fact that it's a dynamic language make problems similar to Node / Python, can't dev serious backend services without a strongly type language. Not saying you can't, but you will have a lot of issues overtime that would have been catch at compile time.
Having used all three in backend systems, I definitely disagree that they have the same problems. Elixir is strongly typed but lacks static typing, in exchange it has a powerful pattern matching system that more than makes up for this problem in my experience.
But fundamentally the issues caused by lacking static typing is different from the problems caused by being weakly typed like python and node systems are.
Re: Lovely Week with Elixir
#15The fact that it's a dynamic language make problems similar to Node / Python, can't dev serious backend services without a strongly type language. Not saying you can't, but you will have a lot of issues overtime that would have been catch at compile time.
The BEAM VM, whether using Elixir, Erlang, or another languages, has been successfully used to implement telecommunication switches, chat services (WhatsApp), and plenty of other "serious backend services."
Re: Lovely Week with Elixir
#16Elixir is decent and I've worked with it a fair amount in production systems... Mostly Rubyists seem to really click with it. And ruby idioms are all over it - you can taste its history and proximity to ruby's ecosystem. As a scala dev that ended up working with elixir for a couple years, my opinion is that a typesafe elixir-like language would really bring BEAM back into the mainstream. Akka is alright but it's shoe…
I want to echo Gleam [0] as a project to watch out for. It's still very early, but it's evolving quickly, and has a big focus on providing ergonomic tooling.
It's an ML inspired, statically typed language that compiles down to Erlang, and supports interop with the existing ecosystem. This means that you get access to ADTs, type inference, etc, while still being able to lean on OTP for your concurrency primitives. There's also examples of calling it from Elixir, so there's the option of falling back to statically typed Gleam for an especially gnarly piece of code, and calling it from your Elixir application [1]. I wouldn't necessarily recommend this for commercial apps yet, but Gleam today is about as usable as early-Elm was, in my opinion.
The project is also very welcoming to new contributors, and Louis (the language's creator) does a great job of curating a list of beginner friendly issues to tackle in the compiler. I've been spending my evenings learning Rust by adding onto the language, and it's been a ton of fun. If you want to help out, there's a fairly active IRC channel on Freenode, in #gleam-lang :)
Re: Lovely Week with Elixir
#17I learned Elixir a few weeks ago as a quarantine self-improvement project and pretty much loved it. There are some warts, as in any language. As someone who's primarily worked in Go and Java in the past and has also been learning Rust I don't super love the optional typing thing, and I end up missing higher-level data constructs like interfaces and traits.
But there are some great language features, like guards and pattern matching, that are hard to give up when you go back to other languages.
Plus it's great to have OTP goodies like GenServer at your fingertips if you run into performance bottlenecks (which you may not!). The OTP APIs are a bit weird coming from other languages but not too bad.
Other things I've liked:
1. Ecto is simply the best DB library I've encountered in any language. I'd almost recommend learning Elixir just to be able to use Ecto.
2. Plug provides great HTTP ergonomics highly reminiscent of Go's context-based middleware approach. Having direct access to the full request/response lifecycle is a win.
3. Phoenix is nice because it's essentially just Plug with some convenient helpers on top. Strikes a really nice balance between configuration and convention by letting you use only what you need. Haven't tried LiveView as I'd prefer to handcraft my own JS but probably worth a shot.
4. Absinthe is the best GraphQL framework I've encountered after many others in other languages left me completely cold.
Re: Lovely Week with Elixir
#18I learned Elixir a few weeks ago as a quarantine self-improvement project and pretty much loved it. There are some warts, as in any language. As someone who's primarily worked in Go and Java in the past and has also been learning Rust I don't super love the optional typing thing, and I end up missing higher-level data constructs like interfaces and traits. But there are some great language features, like guards and p…
Check out the Elixir "protocol" feature, it's similar to interfaces: https://elixir-lang.org/getting-started/protocols.html
Re: Lovely Week with Elixir
#19I learned Elixir a few weeks ago as a quarantine self-improvement project and pretty much loved it. There are some warts, as in any language. As someone who's primarily worked in Go and Java in the past and has also been learning Rust I don't super love the optional typing thing, and I end up missing higher-level data constructs like interfaces and traits. But there are some great language features, like guards and p…
Check out the Elixir "protocol" feature, it's similar to interfaces: https://elixir-lang.org/getting-started/protocols.html
I was just about to say, protocols fill the interface slot pretty well
Re: Lovely Week with Elixir
#20Elixir is decent and I've worked with it a fair amount in production systems... Mostly Rubyists seem to really click with it. And ruby idioms are all over it - you can taste its history and proximity to ruby's ecosystem. As a scala dev that ended up working with elixir for a couple years, my opinion is that a typesafe elixir-like language would really bring BEAM back into the mainstream. Akka is alright but it's shoe…
The older I get the grumpier runtime errors make me.
I want ReasonML (language!) and Erlang (OTP!) to have a baby, and I want it birthed by the Go runtime. (Go? Yeah, Go. I don't love the language, but I am a lover of low latency and garbage collection, what can I say?) Yes, there's Gleam, but if something's based on BEAM, the throughput generally won't impress. :-( Would seem a shame to do all that static typing, and then not reap the speed benefits.
Relatedly, I think there's a sweet spot for a language that accepts mutability inside of actors, but only allows immutable objects to be sent as messages, with an escape hatch available if needed. (Pony explored this space, would love to see it evolve.) Combine that with OTP for happy-path programming, and an ML so you catch most of your errors at compile time, and you could end up with great throughput, low latency and great ergonomics, all at the same time.