Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Switching to Elixir

leemeichin.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 283 posts

Re: Switching to Elixir

#101

Post by lawn »

cheema33 wrote: post #8

How do people switch programming languages? Established languages have massive ecosystems. Large set of libraries. For example, I cannot give up MS Entity Framework Core or Hot Chocolate graphql server for C#. Sure, there are alternatives, but nothing as feature complete. Perhaps it is possible for applications that have small set of requirements.

You just have to learn to let go of your favorite frameworks and libraries.

If you do that then you'll often find loads of other amazing things that are better on the other side.

For example; maybe there's nothing like the MS Entity Framework Core, but instead you'll get to use OTP that everyone's always gushing about which may solve many issues you're having with your current tech stack.

Switching languages (and frameworks and libraries) is amazingly useful because you'll get exposed to solutions you didn't even knew you wanted.

Re: Switching to Elixir

#102

Post by yuppiepuppie »

throwawaymaths wrote: post #47
jbmsf wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meh. I don't want background jobs to be a breeze in quite this way. I want background work to live on different compute capacity than http requests, both because they have very different resources usage and because I want to have state or queues in front of background work so there's a well-defined process for retry, error handling, and back-pressure. I get it, of course, it'd be lovely if these complications didn't…

You're creating a really difficult distributed systems problem then. What happens if the async request gets swallowed? Are you coordinating telemetry and tracing across these compute units? Not all of us can afford elaborate ops teams

Its really not that difficult to trace this stuff with modern APM tools. Datadog and Elastic APM support this out of the box for most languages/frameworks. And id be suprised if other big players in space didnt also.

Re: Switching to Elixir

#103

Post by lawn »

da39a3ee wrote: post #83

> There are no classes, no instances, no inheritance I don't know anything about Elixir, but it bothers me when people claim that languages like Rust and Go are "not object oriented". If you create structs and have special syntax for defining functions that operate on instances of those structs, then those are called objects and you are doing OOP. Just because some Java people came up with a definition of OOP that sa…

And Erlang (and Elixir) is also closer to the original definition of OOP, with it's focus on message passing between processes ("objects").

Re: Switching to Elixir

#104

Post by devoutsalsa »

victorbjorklund wrote: post #75
zoogeny wrote: post #56

I have been watching Elixir YouTube videos pretty much every day for the last few weeks. I guess there was an Elixir conference recently and after I watched a couple, YouTube has been sending me a consistent stream of Elixir content. I really want to try out this language. I love the idea of Erlang but the few times I've had to deal with it (an ejabberd chat server was one) I found it to be a bit too quirky. Every vi…

I actually find the opposite to be true. Elixir is less "magic" once you learn it. I can see and understand what most things are doing and read the code. With javascript? Not so much. On the point of hard to hire and hard to find tutorials. It is true. It is way harder to find for example someone that done what you wanna do in elixir vs javascript. When it comes to libaries it isnt so big problem. There are lots of l…

Elixir is actually the easiest language to read (for me), once I knew it. You can make it difficult to follow if you want to, but when people are using it to pass around plain old data structures, it's very legible. Speaking only for myself. YMMV.

Re: Switching to Elixir

#105

Post by Kiro »

rishav_sharan wrote: post #52
byhemechi wrote: post #34

I often see people say static typing slows them down and I'd really like to know why that is because for me it's the exact opposite, I really don't like not knowing what format data is in. I'd much rather have to write slightly more verbose code and have a vast number of possible errors caught at compile time instead of having things go wrong in production when someone inputs something a bit weird with nothing so muc…

I just moved from typescript to javascript and for me it was just that I own the database, i own the api surfaces and as such I don't need to enforce any kind of type checking as the api schemas are sufficient for my case. I would definitely use type safety if I had a lot of external data sources. or if there are lots of people working with me. Otherwise, I am beginning to go back to dynamic languages at least for we…

That only works for people with super memory. I already forgot what the code I wrote yesterday does. If you showed me code I wrote a month ago I wouldn't even know it was me who wrote it. I could never rely on just remembering API surfaces.

Re: Switching to Elixir

#106

Post by miroljub »

olivermuty wrote: post #89
mijamo wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it vastly depends what you're writing. Any kind of function that does not have a fixed input and output gets a lot more complex with static types. And by extension any code that depends on that also gets more complex. I tried at some point to use Rust for an API but then I depended on making calls to a very complex API. In JavaScript I would have just gotten back a complex object where I can then pick whateve…

Elixir dev here, just to put the context in place first hehe. Couldn’t that thing be typed as the web format? A nested set of string props with either string or number types in the leaves. Then use those types to traverse and pull into «real» types? I like to put structured data into structs in elixir too and the above is essentially what I would do in Elixir. I don’t know rust well enough to see if I am missing some…

You can do that in every language, even in Java 1.0, by just using a hash maps of objects, and cast those objects to whatever you like at runtime before accessing them.

But then, you are basically throwing out your static type checks and just using it as a dynamic language, but with much more verbosity, cruft and additional ways to should yourself in the foot.

Re: Switching to Elixir

#107

Post by wofo »

byhemechi wrote: post #34

I often see people say static typing slows them down and I'd really like to know why that is because for me it's the exact opposite, I really don't like not knowing what format data is in. I'd much rather have to write slightly more verbose code and have a vast number of possible errors caught at compile time instead of having things go wrong in production when someone inputs something a bit weird with nothing so muc…

Lack of proper types is what killed the joy of programming in Elixir for me (I lasted 6 months, hoping I would somehow adapt, but the experience was so miserable that I decided to move on). I simply can't understand how anyone can be productive in a big codebase without the rigor of static typing, but those people exist, so I guess there must be something about our brains that divides us in the dynamic vs static typing camps.

Re: Switching to Elixir

#108

Post by Champagn3Papi »

thibaut_barrere wrote: post #79
zoogeny wrote: post #56

I have been watching Elixir YouTube videos pretty much every day for the last few weeks. I guess there was an Elixir conference recently and after I watched a couple, YouTube has been sending me a consistent stream of Elixir content. I really want to try out this language. I love the idea of Erlang but the few times I've had to deal with it (an ejabberd chat server was one) I found it to be a bit too quirky. Every vi…

> There is a huge risk in niche languages and platforms. Hard to hire for, hard to find libraries for, hard to find blogs/tutorials/etc. There is a real need to push Elixir outside its initial circles and it's being done a bit at the moment (I feel). Both Chris & José are doing a lot of work for exposure outside the initial Elixir circles, and some people in the community are doing the same at their own levels. Hirin…

I switched jobs and working as an elixir dev now. I love elixir don't get me wrong, but some of the documentation especially some of the more advanced features in ecto are very confusing.

It doesn't help you can define your ecto instructions in multiple flavors too (inline vs piping)

You can't mix inline with pipe operators without creating an additiona variable too hold the original query.

If we want to make it less niche, there's definitely good working points there. Once people understand how to hit a database from elixir it magically clicks and the other stuff is more trivial.

Re: Switching to Elixir

#109

Post by thibaut_barrere »

Champagn3Papi wrote: post #108
thibaut_barrere wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is a huge risk in niche languages and platforms. Hard to hire for, hard to find libraries for, hard to find blogs/tutorials/etc. There is a real need to push Elixir outside its initial circles and it's being done a bit at the moment (I feel). Both Chris & José are doing a lot of work for exposure outside the initial Elixir circles, and some people in the community are doing the same at their own levels. Hirin…

I switched jobs and working as an elixir dev now. I love elixir don't get me wrong, but some of the documentation especially some of the more advanced features in ecto are very confusing. It doesn't help you can define your ecto instructions in multiple flavors too (inline vs piping) You can't mix inline with pipe operators without creating an additiona variable too hold the original query. If we want to make it less…

Ecto is a specific area and I must say I share your view on the "flavours" aspect (keywords vs not). I would personally love if there was only "one way".

And agree that there are both excellent documentation, _and_ things that are kind of "assumed" and would need better "beginner" stuff (in my opinion).

Re: Switching to Elixir

#110

Post by voxadam »

colesantiago wrote: post #16

Which companies have used Elixir in production, I know Brex used to use Elixir but now used Kotlin and also the Bleacher Report. Are there any more?

Some case studies of Elixir's use at various companies can be found on the main Elixir site.[0]

[0] https://elixir-lang.org/cases.html

Post reply on HN