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Why am I interested in Elixir?

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Re: Why am I interested in Elixir?

#31

Post by benmmurphy »

zeitg3ist wrote: post #18
benmmurphy wrote: post #10

coming from erlang elixir is much nicer than that. exunit is miles ahead of eunit and i feel like that would be enough to convince me to switch. the with syntax is nice and helps to deal with early exit on errors but still feels a bit awkward compared to imperative control flow. like you can do something like this in an imperative language: foo, err = func() if err != nil { return nil, Err("bad") } bah, err = func2(f…

Not sure I understand completely your problem and I apologize if this is a stupid question, but can’t you just pattern match the errors in with’s else block?

this depends on errors being unique to the line they come from. if any of your errors overlap then it doesn't work. for example what if you have a bunch of functions that return {error, :notfound} and you want to handle each differently. also you don't have access to any previous values instantiated in the else block. if you could have an else block for each <- that short-circuited and had access to previously <- assigned values it would be perfect.

Re: Why am I interested in Elixir?

#32

Post by enraged_camel »

cutler wrote: post #27
PopeDotNinja wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love Elixir, but the learning curve was steep. Async everything, dialyzer, macros, Erlang errors, charlist vs string vs iolist... It was a lot to take in. Edit: 4 upvotes in 4 minutes. I guess people are reading this... for anyone who hasn't already discovered it, the saving grace for me was the Elixir Slack channel. I also learned while working with someone who really knows Erlang, which helped quite a bit, too. I…

.... and no vectors/arrays.

There is List, which is similar (but not quite the same).

Other than that, you may want to give this a read: https://elixirforum.com/t/arrays/8850/13

tl;dr: the type of data structure that would satisfy your use case almost certainly exists in Elixir, but you need to look around a bit.

Re: Why am I interested in Elixir?

#33

Post by benmmurphy »

sergiotapia wrote: post #26
benmmurphy wrote: post #10

coming from erlang elixir is much nicer than that. exunit is miles ahead of eunit and i feel like that would be enough to convince me to switch. the with syntax is nice and helps to deal with early exit on errors but still feels a bit awkward compared to imperative control flow. like you can do something like this in an imperative language: foo, err = func() if err != nil { return nil, Err("bad") } bah, err = func2(f…

You need to do it this way, it's more idiomatic: with {:user_created?, {:ok, user}} # something _ -> # some unhandled error end And so on, use an atom on the fly to identify branches and error conditions. But honestly most of the time you worry about happy paths and Let It Crash.

yeah this is kind of horrible once you get to high levels of nesting. in an imperative language you can return early in the error paths and your function will still be understandable. this doesn't work with a single return. you can easily have 6 guard statements in an imperative language and your function will be comprehensible try doing 6 levels of nesting in elixir and it will be a complete mess.

Re: Why am I interested in Elixir?

#34

Post by kuzee »

Coming from Ruby and Python and a bit of node, Elixir encourages a really convenient mental model for thinking about small and large parts of your app in the same way. Net result is fewer bugs created, easier to write tests so you write more, and easy to debug when they do happen. And because of the fault tolerance, most production bugs are so transient they're not causing problems. I've run several small webapps with a few thousand users and the maintenance is minimal because of how solid the language is.

Re: Why am I interested in Elixir?

#35

Post by derefr »

cutler wrote: post #27
PopeDotNinja wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love Elixir, but the learning curve was steep. Async everything, dialyzer, macros, Erlang errors, charlist vs string vs iolist... It was a lot to take in. Edit: 4 upvotes in 4 minutes. I guess people are reading this... for anyone who hasn't already discovered it, the saving grace for me was the Elixir Slack channel. I also learned while working with someone who really knows Erlang, which helped quite a bit, too. I…

.... and no vectors/arrays.

You've got:

• http://erlang.org/doc/man/atomics.html and http://erlang.org/doc/man/counters.html for cheap, mutable uint64 arrays;

• The http://erlang.org/doc/man/array.html module for a functional persistent vector abstraction (similar to the one in Clojure);

• ETS ordered_set tables, for mutable AVL trees (for when you want to cheaply apply a sequence of random mutations to a collection of terms without building a lot of garbage);

• The process dictionary (https://www.erlang.org/course/advanced#dict), a mutable per-process hash-map data-structure, for when ETS ordered_set tables have too much inter-process copying overhead.

All that, plus Erlang lists (singly-linked lists) are really cheap the way Erlang does them. (Each Erlang actor-process gets its own heap that gets independently GCed; short-lived processes never experience even a single GC, so allocating linked-list nodes (by consing to the beginning of a list) is just a matter of incrementing the actor-process's heap's free pointer—about the same level of optimality you'd hope to get from pushing to the end of a vector.)

Re: Why am I interested in Elixir?

#36

Post by golemiprague »

nickjj wrote: post #12

I'm currently building a video course hosting platform with Elixir / Phoenix and all I can really say is this has been the nicest tech stack I've ever used in 20 years of web development. IMO it really does feel like you get the best of everything (developer productivity, developer happiness, great language for creating maintainable code, OTP and the BEAM bring a lot to the table, it's memory efficient, tracing code…

I don't know, it is not that fast per cpu and memory, just keeping up with node and the JVM. It doesn't have all the libraries that JVM based libraries or node/python have and there is a steep learning curve involved, both of the language itself, the concepts, the relation to erlang and the OTP. I will a little more unless I need to write something for the specific cases where erlang and the OTP really shines, but most of us don't need that.

Re: Why am I interested in Elixir?

#37

Post by verttii »

thelazydogsback wrote: post #28
verttii wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually started off with Elixir but now working my way up with statically typed langs, most notably Haskell. I've found Haskell's type system allows me to express complex business logic far better than anything else I've ever gotten my hands on. It's clearly superior to Elixir in that regard in my opinion, although it does come at a price (steep learning curve). That said, in a lot of other ways Haskell is not as…

Sounds like F# on dotnetcore or Reason may suite you

What makes you say that? I mean what would they do better than I could do with Elixir or Haskell? I use Elixir when typical APIs or stateful soft real-time stuff is needed and Haskell whenever I have some complex data structures and logic to work on.

I'm unfamiliar with F# and .NET stuff. C# I don't like one bit, if that's anywhere near that avenue. I've tried Reason but didn't quite click with it. Ended up preferring Elm for the frontend side, although Purescript could be even a better fit for me there.

Re: Why am I interested in Elixir?

#38

Post by erokar »

jb1991 wrote: post #20
nickjj wrote: post #12

I'm currently building a video course hosting platform with Elixir / Phoenix and all I can really say is this has been the nicest tech stack I've ever used in 20 years of web development. IMO it really does feel like you get the best of everything (developer productivity, developer happiness, great language for creating maintainable code, OTP and the BEAM bring a lot to the table, it's memory efficient, tracing code…

I love hearing stories like yours. I wonder how Elixir would compare to Clojure, which I've used and liked for web development for many years. I hear nothing but good things about Elixir but I wonder if it would bring something new to the table for me in the "really liking it" category.

I think you will find Elixir itself very similar to Clojure. They are both functional, dynamic languages with immutable data structures. They both use protocols/behaviors to achieve polymorphism in similar ways (e.g. functions working with collections (Clojure) and enumerations (Elixir)).

While there is a superficial syntactical difference I think the most important differentiation is the runtimes, the JVM versus the BEAM. JVM will outperform BEAM with regards to computations, while the BEAM has better support for true immutability and concurrency.

With regards to web development specifically the Elixir community seems to more or less have converged around a framework approach with Phoenix, while Clojure (too me) seems more geared towards a collection of libraries approach, á la Node.js.

I don't have much experience with Clojure's tooling story, but the tools that come come bundled with Elixir, like Mix (build tool) and ExUnit (testing framework), are very good. Compared to the languages I have experience with (Python, Ruby, JS, Java, C#) Elixir provides the best developer ergonomics out of the box.

Re: Why am I interested in Elixir?

#40

Post by oftenwrong »

nickjj wrote: post #12

I'm currently building a video course hosting platform with Elixir / Phoenix and all I can really say is this has been the nicest tech stack I've ever used in 20 years of web development. IMO it really does feel like you get the best of everything (developer productivity, developer happiness, great language for creating maintainable code, OTP and the BEAM bring a lot to the table, it's memory efficient, tracing code…

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