> Exceptions, then! In Ruby it's common to use exceptions for control flow.
"common"? Not IME. Certainly possible, but I don't see it a WHOLE lot. Maybe it's just $CURRENTJOB's style not to, I'll grant.
Switching to Elixir
151–160 of 283 posts
Re: Switching to Elixir
#152>A few months ago I started a new job at a company that uses Elixir as its main language >I've never written a line of Elixir or Erlang before in my life How is this possible?
It's possible because the number of programmers that have been exposed to Erlang and Elixir is a very small fraction of the total. Besides, many programmers go through their whole career in a single eco-system (.NET, Java, C, C++, COBOL, PHP etc).
Re: Switching to Elixir
#153I 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…
The basic idea that infuses all of Armstrong's writings and work is reliability, not concurrency, that's just a means to an end to achieve higher reliability (and lower latency, which in the context of (soft) real time can be a failure condition if certain guarantees are not met.
Re: Switching to Elixir
#154I 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 went from Ruby to Elixir to Nodejs. I am writing Nodejs because I have to, not because I want to. Having used it now, I will never ever start a new project with it. Nodejs's concurrency controls, ability to scale, tools for reliability and observability are so far behind from the BEAM ecosystem. I sometimes think people think Elixir is too good to be true because they're too used to platforms not designed to be res…
The whole reason Nodejs exists is because programmers eternally re-invent the wheel instead of accepting that there are already some pretty good wheels that they probably have no chance of matching.
Re: Switching to Elixir
#155I 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 typi…
My best programming experience ever has been in OCaml and I love the idea of Elixir, but I can't even bring myself to try it because I know I'm not going to enjoy not having types. Even something as allegedly shitty as Python's type system would do it for me. I'm aware that there are ongoing projects to add typing to Elixir and I'll keep watching out how they evolve.
Re: Switching to Elixir
#156I 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…
Every time an elixir discussion starts a vocal segment of people just starts complaining about types. Ok we get it you like types, can you leave the rest of us in peace
Re: Switching to Elixir
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 typi…
I'm firmly in the camp that it's all perception. The studies I've seen aren't what I would consider conclusive, but they certainly suggest there is very little difference in the output and bugs of dynamic vs static languages. In my experience, static typing seemed to lend itself to poor testing, maybe some sort of belief that static types were good enough to not need tests that can prevent regressions. So from my poi…
I literally struggle to read and work with dynamic code. My head explodes when trying to hold return types or the shape of semi-complex data structures in my head, versus having it spelled out. I wouldn't call it an issue of "perception", I really think in my case it's "capability", pure and simple. I've programmed for thousands of hours in both styles, so we're well past the possibility of this being an adaptation problem.
I am totally convinced that the advocates of dynamic programming are right, too, just possibly built differently. For example, if I had an order of magnitude more working memory than I have as an individual (I'm assuming that's neurologically plausible), maybe I'd view dynamic programming differently, too.
Re: Switching to Elixir
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
I went from Ruby to Elixir to Nodejs. I am writing Nodejs because I have to, not because I want to. Having used it now, I will never ever start a new project with it. Nodejs's concurrency controls, ability to scale, tools for reliability and observability are so far behind from the BEAM ecosystem. I sometimes think people think Elixir is too good to be true because they're too used to platforms not designed to be res…
Elixir is definitely a better Nodejs... that JS developers don't know about.
It took me months before it sank in that Nodejs async wasn't really async as I knew it from Elixir -- there's an implicit queue, and no true suspension of the execution flow.
One justification for this was that it is supposed to make it easier to reason. It made it more difficult for me to reason -- maybe single-threaded async reactor is a poor substitute for immutability.
Unhandled promise rejection is an example of a consequence of this design. That's not really a thing in Elixir by design. But in the Nodejs world, people don't even see it as a design flaw. It makes reasoning about reliability much more difficult.
Re: Switching to Elixir
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 typi…
I believe this as well. I like dynamic typing, because it often feels to me that rigour of static typing is slowing the prototyping phase. Plus overusing types creates a lot of boilerplate. In one of the frontends I've seen adding a boolean field to a form required changing over 10 files - thank you Typescript. On the other hand, sometimes I feel like it has a lot to do with test writing. I feel people enjoy static t…
> If you do write tests, all the type errors get caught pretty immediately anyway, so I just don't see the benefit.
That's a pretty big if, though. You will never catch me in my typed backyard, writing tests that say: if typeof(arg) =! string then return error("Not a string!")
An additional problem of course is that solutions that assume extra work from people, tend to be brittle ones (also thinking about "manual backups" here) aka. those tests will end not being written at all.
Re: Switching to Elixir
#160I 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…
Every time an elixir discussion starts a vocal segment of people just starts complaining about types. Ok we get it you like types, can you leave the rest of us in peace
It's just a hype phase. Types are cool, but in the past few years they seem to be the panacea for all problems, by inexperienced engineers that have got their first taste of Rust and Typescript. As if writing in Typescript would produce less buggy, more stable or more maintainable applications than using Elixir.
I'll say types are cool again before I get routed by angry static typing zealots.