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What’s the advantage of using this language over Rust, Go, Java (or any other JVM language), or Python?
Having learnt Ruby and a bit of Erlang, I'm interested in Elixir so I fire this tangential question: How would you recommend to learn Elixir? And a follow-up: some ideas for personal Elixir-based projects?
However it doesn't teach you much about the concurrency model or Erlang/OTP, which I hear is the real reason for using it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you really want to learn Elixir, you should learn enough Erlang prior, to get a better understanding of how Erlang/OTP all fits together. Thus, I would recommend the following structure: 1. Read Joe Armstrong's Book: Programming Erlang to learn the basics and the philosophy behind Erlang from one of its creators. [1] 2. Read Erlang and OTP in Action to learn more about the OTP (Open Telecom Platform), applications…
This makes me not want to learn elixir. Learning one language and becoming masterful at it is hard enough. There's too many "learn this language, but also this other language and platform"'s in my life (JVM-based work, and anything in the front-end JavaScript world it feels like these days). It just feels like you are telling people "Here, learn this language, but also learn the assembly instruction set for your arch…
You can learn the syntax of Elixir, Python, Go, whatever very fast, but becoming a master is much less about its syntax - that is usually a trivial part. It is more about underlying standard library, concurrency, collection, execution model, GC, patterns, and caveats.
Although finding green and red mismatches in pages of output of your data structure was fun :)
.. no
Thanks for the work on Elixir!
What’s the advantage of using this language over Rust, Go, Java (or any other JVM language), or Python?
Asking for "the advantage" is probably not quite the right question. Different toolbox, different tools, for different solutions to different jobs. Elixir runs on the Erlang VM, is functional, has a Ruby-like syntax.
What’s the advantage of using this language over Rust, Go, Java (or any other JVM language), or Python?
- It runs on the Erlang VM, which is (tech-wise, anyway) fairly old and battle tested. It was deliberately built for resiliency and concurrency. It has some very clever concepts, like supervision trees, cheap processes, interprocess communication via message passing (hey, sounds like OO, right?), and 0 downtime deployments built-in.
- Its creators (namely Jose Valim) come from the Ruby community, and value a lot of the same things Rubyists do: good documentation, testing, and excellent tools for package management, debugging, builds, testing, etc. Several libraries are very similar to their Ruby counterparts. E.g., Phoenix will feel very familiar to a Rails developer. Ditto, the syntax is kind of similar to Ruby. The paradigm is completely different, as Elixir is an immutable, functional programming language. But... aesthetically, they look similar-ish.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you really want to learn Elixir, you should learn enough Erlang prior, to get a better understanding of how Erlang/OTP all fits together. Thus, I would recommend the following structure: 1. Read Joe Armstrong's Book: Programming Erlang to learn the basics and the philosophy behind Erlang from one of its creators. [1] 2. Read Erlang and OTP in Action to learn more about the OTP (Open Telecom Platform), applications…
I completely disagree. You don’t need to learn Erlang to learn elixir. Learn elixir use it, you can be very productive with it. If later for whatever reason you want to dive deeper into Erlang you can. I’ve used elixir for 5 years now. And I’ve never had to Erlang, the most I’ve done is use some Erlang libraries in elixir. Elixir can stand on its own
Having learnt Ruby and a bit of Erlang, I'm interested in Elixir so I fire this tangential question: How would you recommend to learn Elixir? And a follow-up: some ideas for personal Elixir-based projects?
This is a course a few friends are working through and they recommended it highly. https://codestool.coding-gnome.com/courses/elixir-for-progra...
Its author—Dave Thomas—also wrote prag prog's Programming Elixir book, which I found very helpful a few years ago.
Unfortunately, initial enthusiasm a few years ago did lead to its wide adoption.
I talked with a couple of companies that jumped on it initially, but later decided to move to Java, Kotlin, Go. The main reason was difficulty to hire engineers to scale up quickly (in Europe), not some technical disappointments.
Sadly, it seems that being a scalable platform is not enough to scale up to business needs.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Asking for "the advantage" is probably not quite the right question. Different toolbox, different tools, for different solutions to different jobs. Elixir runs on the Erlang VM, is functional, has a Ruby-like syntax.
How easy (or hard) is it to learn Elixir for someone with Python/PHP/JS background and zero knowledge of functional programming? Also, are there job opportunities for Elixir or is it a niche language?
Elixir is not quite as popular as Go. But there are absolutely job opportunities out there. And huge projects currently using it (e.g., Discord). I wouldn't focus on needing there to be a job market to learn something new, though. You'll learn techniques and a new way of problem solving that will make you a better Python, JS, and PHP programmer, even if you never professionally work as an Elixir developer.
The Introduction guide on the Elixir website is a really good place to get started. You should be able to pick up the basics pretty quickly: https://elixir-lang.org/getting-started/introduction.html