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Elixir v1.10

elixir-lang.org

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Re: Elixir v1.10

#101

Post by ericsanchez »

fyfy18 wrote: post #100
histriosum wrote: post #89

I've been tempted a few times to dip my toes into Elixir -- I like the language and the BEAM concepts, but in my environment I always bump into the following concern.. Ecto v3 has been out for more than a year now, and there are still only two supported adapters.. MySQL and Postgres. In my environment, I use a lot of MSSQL and SQLite in addition to Postgres, and those adapters haven't been successfully ported over to…

I think this hits on one of my biggest complaints with the Elixir and Erlang ecosystem. As a high level toolkit for building distributed systems it's great, but if you need to do something more low level you are often left on your own using a third party library. This on it's own isn't a big deal, Ruby has the same limitations. Unfortunately the Erlang and Elixir ecosystems aren't as big as Ruby, so that often means…

This. Thanks, this was the kind of thing I came here for.

Re: Elixir v1.10

#102

Post by waylandsmithers »

happy_path wrote: post #3

Having learnt Ruby and a bit of Erlang, I'm interested in Elixir so I fire this tangential question: How would you recommend to learn Elixir? And a follow-up: some ideas for personal Elixir-based projects?

After reading through the guides on the official website I went through the course on learnelixir.tv- basically the creator runs through each topic in the language in a series of videos in his code editor. I think it's $20 or so for permanent stream/download access and access to any new videos he puts out. (Maybe the creator is on HN?) I got most of my team up to speed on elixir this way.

Re: Elixir v1.10

#103

Post by waylandsmithers »

wincy wrote: post #26
josevalim wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is curious to see Plataformatec being referred to as Elixir's parent company but I guess it makes sense legally. Plataformatec does own the trademarks for the name and language - which we are currently working on moving the control to the Elixir Core Team. In terms of development, however, it is more of a shared custody by many community members and companies. For example, Elixir Core Team has 6 developers and onl…

Thanks for your work Jose! My second dev language in my career after PHP was Elixir, and I think I’m a better developer for it. It took me months to learn, I felt like I was learning Martian, but I hope to get back to a job where I’m working in Elixir some day.

Here here! Having only worked in object oriented languages before, learning Elixir completely changed the way I think about programming.

Re: Elixir v1.10

#104

Post by grimjack00 »

playing_colours wrote: post #49

A very interesting language on powerful platform with a promising web framework. Many saw it, myself included, as a Ruby / Rails Improved, and expected its quick growth. Unfortunately, initial enthusiasm a few years ago did lead to its wide adoption. I talked with a couple of companies that jumped on it initially, but later decided to move to Java, Kotlin, Go. The main reason was difficulty to hire engineers to scale…

Was it difficult to hire engineers proficient in Elixir, or was it difficult to hire engineers who could _learn_ Elixir?

When my employer decided to use Elixir for a new product, we had maybe 2-3 people experienced in Erlang/Elixir; for the rest of us, it was "'Programming Elixir' is on the bookshelf; start working through that." That and pairing with the more experienced devs got most of us up to speed enough that we were fairly productive in a couple weeks. Since we were basically a Rails shop at that point, the similarity to Ruby didn't hurt, and as I've mentioned elsewhere in this discussion, the docs for Elixir and major libraries are really good.

Re: Elixir v1.10

#105

Post by conradfr »

justaguyhere wrote: post #45
thomasfedb wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Asking for "the advantage" is probably not quite the right question. Different toolbox, different tools, for different solutions to different jobs. Elixir runs on the Erlang VM, is functional, has a Ruby-like syntax.

How easy (or hard) is it to learn Elixir for someone with Python/PHP/JS background and zero knowledge of functional programming? Also, are there job opportunities for Elixir or is it a niche language?

It can kick your butt at first but once it click it's really fun.

Job opportunities seem tied to doing RoR as well, but I guess that's less and less true.

Re: Elixir v1.10

#106

Post by ctas »

My team and me rely heavily upon Elixir and the Beam VM within our startup and couldn't be happier. I'm glad to see continuous improvements beyond the acquisition of Plataformatec.

Re: Elixir v1.10

#107

Post by josevalim »

histriosum wrote: post #89

I've been tempted a few times to dip my toes into Elixir -- I like the language and the BEAM concepts, but in my environment I always bump into the following concern.. Ecto v3 has been out for more than a year now, and there are still only two supported adapters.. MySQL and Postgres. In my environment, I use a lot of MSSQL and SQLite in addition to Postgres, and those adapters haven't been successfully ported over to…

The TDS adapter for MSSQL is almost ready for Ecto v3 thanks to efforts from Milan Jarić. We are also planning to merge it into Ecto SQL, so it doesn't fall behind again.

Meanwhile, I have worked with a company that had to use MSSQL and they ended-up using two Ecto MSSQL adapters at the same time so they could cover all use cases, which is obviously far from ideal.

It is one of these things that, if we had updated it as we went along, it wouldn't have been so much work, but because it fell behind, the amount of work becomes quite big.

However, there are no plans for a built-in sqlite3 adapter, so your observation still holds true. Sometimes you will stumble upon a part of the ecosystem that is not quite there, and then you need to make a decision between waiting, developing it, or using something else.

Re: Elixir v1.10

#108

Post by S04dKHzrKT »

histriosum wrote: post #89

I've been tempted a few times to dip my toes into Elixir -- I like the language and the BEAM concepts, but in my environment I always bump into the following concern.. Ecto v3 has been out for more than a year now, and there are still only two supported adapters.. MySQL and Postgres. In my environment, I use a lot of MSSQL and SQLite in addition to Postgres, and those adapters haven't been successfully ported over to…

I haven't looked into Elixir so it might not be at all similar, but you might look into F# + Saturn. I know Saturn is heavily influenced by Phoenix. There are a few different data access libraries that might fit your needs: Entity Framework, Dapper, F# Sql Provider, Rezoom.Sql.

https://github.com/SaturnFramework/Saturn

Re: Elixir v1.10

#109

Post by methyl »

fyfy18 wrote: post #100
histriosum wrote: post #89

I've been tempted a few times to dip my toes into Elixir -- I like the language and the BEAM concepts, but in my environment I always bump into the following concern.. Ecto v3 has been out for more than a year now, and there are still only two supported adapters.. MySQL and Postgres. In my environment, I use a lot of MSSQL and SQLite in addition to Postgres, and those adapters haven't been successfully ported over to…

I think this hits on one of my biggest complaints with the Elixir and Erlang ecosystem. As a high level toolkit for building distributed systems it's great, but if you need to do something more low level you are often left on your own using a third party library. This on it's own isn't a big deal, Ruby has the same limitations. Unfortunately the Erlang and Elixir ecosystems aren't as big as Ruby, so that often means…

> I've hbeen working on extracting that part of the system into a Go app, called via gRPC

What if you called it via Port instead of gRPC?

We are also using Elixir at our SaaS for more than 2 years in production. There are times (although rare) when Elixir performance is just not enough. For those cases we tend to use Rustler, which makes integration with Rust code pretty safe and straightforward. Did you consider Rust instead of Go?

Re: Elixir v1.10

#110

Post by jamil7 »

s3cur3 wrote: post #51
xyst wrote: post #38

What’s the advantage of using this language over Rust, Go, Java (or any other JVM language), or Python?

Elixir (really, the Erlang VM it's built on) is designed for highly concurrent, reliable systems. For my org, building a distributed webapp, we chose it over the languages you listed because of how much you get "out of the box" with Elixir. Saša Jurić's talk "The Soul of Erlang and Elixir" ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvBT4XBdoUE ) is a good introduction to why someone might choose Elixir. The payoff is the slid…

I hadn't seen that slide, it's pretty compelling. Is there a story for typechecking or a typed language that runs on BEAM? This is one aspect that holds me back a little.
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