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Elixir Livebook now as a desktop app

news.livebook.dev

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Re: Elixir Livebook now as a desktop app

#101

Post by jononomo »

ElemenoPicuares wrote: post #45
kitotik wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elixir also opens you up to the entire erlang and Beam ecosystems. Not as common as Java, I know, but still decades of knowledge and tooling around it cutting across many industries.

Seems like Beam is a more specialized tool than JVM but if you need that sort of functionality it's phenomenal. With things like built-in performant persistent key value stores and cluster management I'm kind of surprised more people haven't pushed through the "this is useful but lacks broad adoption" barrier.

I've heard this, but honestly to me it just seems "specialized for writing and running reliable software".

Re: Elixir Livebook now as a desktop app

#102

Post by jphsnsir »

wojtekmach wrote: post #54
ch4s3 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No Linux download :-( They discussed it, but no one has taken it on yet. I think Wojtek Mach(the desktop initial author) is a mac user, and they actively wanted to provide a way for windows users to easily try it.

We don't plan to add Linux support ourselves at the moment but we'd love if someone contributed that. As was mentioned elsewhere it might be challenging to provide a bundle that works across different distributions so investigating the possible options would be an important first step.

Have you looked into nix? Works for mac and linux.

Re: Elixir Livebook now as a desktop app

#103

Post by jolux »

throwawaymaths wrote: post #93
urxvtcd wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hm, I think I've read somewhere that both Go and Elixir and kinda cooperative. A process in Elixir can yield control after certain number of reductions (function calls I think) and in Go a goroutine can only yield control on function calls, so if you have an infinite loop just adding numbers it will run uninterrupted. Both of them are "less cooperative" than Python with explicit yield statement. Do I get this right?…

Yes technically they are not fully preemptive in the sense that an os thread is (the os sends an interrupt which halts the processing at the CPU level), but in both go and elixir the programmer has no control over when the context switching happens, and "function calls" which are the yield boundaries happen all over the place, so it's "effectively preemptive". Elixir is in practice more preemptive than go (last I che…

Yes, unless you're in a BIF or NIF every call is a reduction: https://blog.stenmans.org/theBeamBook/#_reductions so if you call out to native code or are using a VM builtin you can lock it up indefinitely but other than that it's not possible.

Re: Elixir Livebook now as a desktop app

#104

Post by akoutmos »

frellus wrote: post #87

I'm currently reading an Elixir Patterns book ( https://elixirpatterns.dev ) which releases a side-by-side Livebook for the material with each chapter. It's a fantastic way to learn and a huge advantage over other languages, I think, to help build up the Elixir community.

Co-author of Elixir Patterns here :).

Really appreciate the kind words and happy to hear that you are enjoying the book! Hugo Baraúna and I have really enjoyed putting this book together and feel that Livebook has become pivotal in explaining certain topics and really understanding how things work under the hood. I wrote a blog post about some of my thoughts around Livebook as a learning tool on the DashBit blog: https://dashbit.co/blog/livebook-as-an-educational-tool

Re: Elixir Livebook now as a desktop app

#106

Post by fshr »

z9znz wrote: post #69
didibus wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems making a Lisp popular is an impossible task. That said, I'm not sure if the data agrees with you. I think Clojure is more popular and widely used at this time. Not sure, but I think from what I remember of the few rankings, and just the fact I don't know an equivalent success story to NuBank for Elixir, I think maybe Clojure is at the moment more popular in practice. But with the amazing learning material El…

I would think that NuBank would want to market and promote Clojure to ensure that there would be ample numbers of Clojure developers (since NuBank depends on a lot of Clojure code). Perhaps they do market Clojure in Brazil, but I don't see it elsewhere...

With 213 million people, they do have a ton of devs and a ton of ESL speakers. There’s lots of places like that, like Turkey or SE Asia, where word doesn’t reach NA/wEU.

Re: Elixir Livebook now as a desktop app

#107

Post by fleeno »

As someone who also doesn't know Jupyter, what sort of fun and useful things would I do with this? It looks like I can add content and some code blocks that I can execute. I guess taking notes and tinkering?

I'm messing with Elixir just for fun, so this caught my eye.

Re: Elixir Livebook now as a desktop app

#108

Post by dr_kiszonka »

chasers wrote: post #85
dr_kiszonka wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[I have no experience with Elixir.] Would that be possible to have elixir intelligently manage multiprocessing of python scripts? I would be especially interested in being able to have the scripts talk to each other, but have no idea how it could work, besides perhaps having them communicate by writing to / reading from the same files, which seems risky.

There is actually a case study on elixir-lang.org of exactly this! https://elixir-lang.org/blog/2021/01/13/orchestrating-comput...

Very informative - thanks!

Re: Elixir Livebook now as a desktop app

#109

Post by dr_kiszonka »

jononomo wrote: post #99
dr_kiszonka wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[I have no experience with Elixir.] Would that be possible to have elixir intelligently manage multiprocessing of python scripts? I would be especially interested in being able to have the scripts talk to each other, but have no idea how it could work, besides perhaps having them communicate by writing to / reading from the same files, which seems risky.

I think you can have the scripts talk to each other through Elixir via the BEAM/OTP approach: for each script you will have a GenServer module that manages it in a separate process. Call this module MyApp.ScriptServer and put "use GenServer" at the top of the file. This GenServer process will have a client API, which you can write, which will be how you interact with your script. In the BEAM programming model, proces…

Thanks for the explanation!

Re: Elixir Livebook now as a desktop app

#110

Post by ElemenoPicuares »

jononomo wrote: post #101
ElemenoPicuares wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like Beam is a more specialized tool than JVM but if you need that sort of functionality it's phenomenal. With things like built-in performant persistent key value stores and cluster management I'm kind of surprised more people haven't pushed through the "this is useful but lacks broad adoption" barrier.

I've heard this, but honestly to me it just seems "specialized for writing and running reliable software".

Seemingly reliable for a specific type of problem, though. Most reliable software doesn't require a distributed network to be reliable, and I don't think binary execution on BEAM is any more inherently reliable than the JVM, right?
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