Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you written any Rust NIFs? What's the dev experience like?
With the Rustler Rust library, almost blissfully easy. I highly recommend it.
I'll have to hit you up for advice on the forum when I try it out.
Elixir 1.5 released
161–167 of 167 posts
Re: Elixir 1.5 released
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
I LOVE the pattern-matching/deconstruction/guards stuff. It eliminates SO much boilerplate logic. Just the function head of an Elixir function eliminates a dozen input validation and assignment lines in most other languages. It wouldn't be nearly as spectacular if it didn't pervade the entire language, though (for example, I'm sure you could get partway there in many other languages using a DSL) Same thing with immut…
>About the only wart I've seen so far in Elixir is the pin operator[6], but that was necessary to preserve the name-rebinding ability in a pattern-matching context, and it stops seeming like a wart fairly quickly, once you realize why it's necessary. I'm interested in hearing more on this, because I find elixir's pattern matching phenomenal. Fully embracing it feels like such a paradigm shift, and along with the rest…
I haven't really seen any. You can't use the pin operator in argument lists to functions... that's the other "gotcha".
Re: Elixir 1.5 released
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
Heroku is OK as a deployment platform. Hex powers Erlang/Elixir communities on a small Heroku dyno ($7). And 99% of Elixir developers should not worry about hot code swapping anyway. Let your load balancer or your PaaS take care of it.
Hex runs on 1 small Heroku Dyno? That's amazing.
I believe that's alongside using Fastly for CDN work, which might pick up a majority of the work, I'm not sure.
Re: Elixir 1.5 released
#164Re: Elixir 1.5 released
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, I could. Though I would avoid using proper ; the aim isn't to deem something "good" or "bad", just whether a name applies to it. An "improper" Lisp is very good and proper something else, and perhaps very Lisp-like language with a lot of conceptual compatibility with Lisp. In a Lisp: * expressions evaluate their sub-expressions strictly, usually in a left-to-right order unless otherwise noted (in the case of con…
strikes me as a detailed description of a very particular implementation that you specifically like. considering lisp is a family of languages - which of these rules do you accept deviations from and by how much?
> that you specifically like
Also false. The requirements could be implemented by something I strongly dislike. For instance, someone's crappy one-weekend Lisp dialect, hopelessly unsuitable for real work, in which an error stops the entire process without leaving a clue where it occurred. I will certainly prefer a quality Lisp-resembling language to such a thing.
Re: Elixir 1.5 released
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
I believe the popular quote with Erlang is that Erlang makes hard things easy & easy things hard. Elixir was built around the idea of keeping the easy things easy. It does so by improving syntax, tooling, documentation & community in my opinion. I believe I first read this idea in the book, Elixir in Action.
Personally, I'm a fan of the Perl philosophy: make the easy things easy and the hard things possible.
I've heard this said about NixOS: It makes the easy things hard and the impossible things hard. :)
Re: Elixir 1.5 released
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not for me. I've gone back and forth between projects that required functional languages, and projects that didn't across different companies. Bad code is bad code no matter what language it's written in. What makes me love my day job is whether I have the ability to make it better, and if those that work with me are aligned in wanting to do so. I think practitioners of functional languages get a little preachy when…
What are functional languages, as a group, "absolutely awful" at?
Low level code. Drivers, interfacing on COM/serial/USB ports, graphics programming or anything that requires more finely tuned data structures you have to manage yourself, low latency work where you can't afford to have a random GC happen at a bad point in the run loop...
Lots of things.