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Why am I interested in Elixir?

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Re: Why am I interested in Elixir?

#41

Post by yelnatz »

oftenwrong wrote: post #40
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…

Are there no bad parts?

I've used it sparingly, I think deploying is pretty bad with it.

I like the convenience of deploying a golang app, just one executable.

Re: Why am I interested in Elixir?

#43

Post by inferiorhuman »

oftenwrong wrote: post #40
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…

Are there no bad parts?

Deployments are a mess and as it is interpreted, performance is closer to Ruby than Go. I found the community to be pretty disappointing (but YMMV obviously) — it seemed more alternative oriented than the Rust community (which seems more solutions oriented).

Re: Why am I interested in Elixir?

#44

Post by erokar »

inferiorhuman wrote: post #43
oftenwrong wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there no bad parts?

Deployments are a mess and as it is interpreted, performance is closer to Ruby than Go. I found the community to be pretty disappointing (but YMMV obviously) — it seemed more alternative oriented than the Rust community (which seems more solutions oriented).

Elixir is compiled, not interpreted.

Re: Why am I interested in Elixir?

#45

Post by GordonS »

PopeDotNinja wrote: post #24
enraged_camel wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't think I've liked a technology this much ever and I'm honestly surprised it's not already more popular than it already is. To be honest, this can probably be almost 100% attributed to the fact that it is not backed and heavily promoted by a tech giant.

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…

Hmm, I'm primarily a C# dev and recently spent a morning getting to know Elixir, and was actually surprised with how flat the learning curve was.

Now, writing idiomatic functional code while coming from an OO background, now that is difficult!

I have to say though, I loved the short time I spent with Elixir so far - it's hard to put a finger on it, but it just feels right. But... I do wish it was statically typed :(

Re: Why am I interested in Elixir?

#47

Post by GordonS »

dkulchenko wrote: post #3

All the backend code for my current startup is in Elixir (switched from Ruby, my previous love). Elixir/Phoenix/Ecto are an absolute joy. It took a bit to get used to immutability and FP but it feels so "cozy", for lack of a better word, to know exactly what my code is doing and to not be bit by obscured mutability and magic anymore.

From your comment I gather you're new to FP. Same here, but with around 20 years of OO experience, I really struggle to understand what idiomatic FP code should look like - was wondering how you'd coped on that front?

Re: Why am I interested in Elixir?

#48

Post by inferiorhuman »

erokar wrote: post #44
inferiorhuman wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Deployments are a mess and as it is interpreted, performance is closer to Ruby than Go. I found the community to be pretty disappointing (but YMMV obviously) — it seemed more alternative oriented than the Rust community (which seems more solutions oriented).

Elixir is compiled, not interpreted.

Compiled into bytecode to be interpreted by the Erlang (BEAM) VM.

Re: Why am I interested in Elixir?

#49

Post by Existenceblinks »

inferiorhuman wrote: post #43
oftenwrong wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there no bad parts?

Deployments are a mess and as it is interpreted, performance is closer to Ruby than Go. I found the community to be pretty disappointing (but YMMV obviously) — it seemed more alternative oriented than the Rust community (which seems more solutions oriented).

It's not a mess. Mostly It was just unclear mixed of runtime and compile time configuration that contribute the inconvenience. Elixir 1.9 just comes up with a simple built-in release mechanism with more clear on how you put configuration.

Re: Why am I interested in Elixir?

#50

Post by erokar »

inferiorhuman wrote: post #48
erokar wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elixir is compiled, not interpreted.

Compiled into bytecode to be interpreted by the Erlang (BEAM) VM.

Are we doing semantics now? Java is also compiled into bytecode, executed by the JVM. Do you consider Java an interpreted language also?
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