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Switching to Elixir

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Re: Switching to Elixir

#41

Post by artdigital »

weatherlight wrote: post #38
byhemechi wrote: post #34

I 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…

because of unification/pattern-matching you have a pretty good idea, just looking at function name + args what the shape of the data is going to be.

As someone who worked with Elixir for the past couple years, and maintains multiple libraries in Elixir - nah not really. Static typing is the thing I'm missing with Elixir.

No matter how much pattern matching you do, and how many typespecs you add to get a better understanding of what's behind a variable, you'll still run into issues at runtime frequently that could have been avoided if it was statically typed.

Dialyzer is great but typespecs and pattern matching only get you so far. You'll always run into situations where the shape of data is not clear, and you have to open a REPL to do an IO.inspect somewhere

Re: Switching to Elixir

#42

Post by whalesalad »

byhemechi wrote: post #34

I 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…

static typing is a means to an end. if you can achieve the same end without static typing, good right? that is the goal of spec.

the creator of the language has a fantastic talk on this https://youtu.be/giYbq4HmfGA?si=LgSHZupSuR-kMXmj

Re: Switching to Elixir

#44

Post by whalesalad »

ungamedplayer wrote: post #20
whalesalad wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's also a challenge to deploy OTP along other non-hypervised runtimes. Pardon?

This part stumped me too. Maybe op had some deployment issues on VM systems.

ngl I get a sense the op and most people commenting in this thread don’t understand elixir at all. the fact that the syntax somewhat resembles ruby is really just 5% of what makes elixir interesting. It’s a distraction from the real value of the beam, OTP, and immutable data.

Re: Switching to Elixir

#45

Post by passion__desire »

byhemechi wrote: post #34

I 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…

Does the code really need to be verbose? Scala does a pretty good job. Infer once at first declaration and enforce throughout.

Re: Switching to Elixir

#46

Post by aryehof »

Write after you’ve been there for 2 years, instead of at the start. That new thing always looks like a flawless shiny new silver bullet when starting out.

Re: Switching to Elixir

#47

Post by throwawaymaths »

jbmsf wrote: post #39
superdisk wrote: post #14

For me the big sell of Elixir/Erlang is that it makes running "background jobs" a complete breeze with no concern for blocking IO bringing the entire server to a halt, especially in a web server context. At my last job I had to do a bunch of HTTP requests in a webhook handler and if enough happened at once, the entire site would just crash due to all the OS processes being busy. I found myself desperately wishing I w…

Meh. I don't want background jobs to be a breeze in quite this way. I want background work to live on different compute capacity than http requests, both because they have very different resources usage and because I want to have state or queues in front of background work so there's a well-defined process for retry, error handling, and back-pressure. I get it, of course, it'd be lovely if these complications didn't…

You're creating a really difficult distributed systems problem then. What happens if the async request gets swallowed? Are you coordinating telemetry and tracing across these compute units?

Not all of us can afford elaborate ops teams

Re: Switching to Elixir

#48

Post by whalesalad »

BMorearty wrote: post #32

> In Ruby it's common to use exceptions for control flow. I think this is just plain incorrect. The example given later in this paragraph is the Rails `update` method--but the approach used in all canonical Rails examples and generators is the non-exception version of `update`.

Ruby != Rails. There are a lot of bang! methods that will raise on error in Rails. But in general Ruby is just like Python in that it is indeed common to use exceptions for control flow.

Re: Switching to Elixir

#49

Post by cultofmetatron »

jbmsf wrote: post #39
superdisk wrote: post #14

For me the big sell of Elixir/Erlang is that it makes running "background jobs" a complete breeze with no concern for blocking IO bringing the entire server to a halt, especially in a web server context. At my last job I had to do a bunch of HTTP requests in a webhook handler and if enough happened at once, the entire site would just crash due to all the OS processes being busy. I found myself desperately wishing I w…

Meh. I don't want background jobs to be a breeze in quite this way. I want background work to live on different compute capacity than http requests, both because they have very different resources usage and because I want to have state or queues in front of background work so there's a well-defined process for retry, error handling, and back-pressure. I get it, of course, it'd be lovely if these complications didn't…

there's nothing stopping you from doing this but its a real game changer for an early stage startup to need a new service and the steps to getting that out is one file and an extra line in your config.

Re: Switching to Elixir

#50

Post by sho »

colesantiago wrote: post #16

Which companies have used Elixir in production, I know Brex used to use Elixir but now used Kotlin and also the Bleacher Report. Are there any more?

There are tons, I can name at least 4 in my city alone, all fintech. Elixir really excels, and is heavily used, at payment processing workflows, where genservers and the concurrency model is amazingly useful at handling complex, multi-step transactions involving multiple, often external, actors.

None of the companies appear on that list, I think those kinds of things should always be taken with a grain of salt.

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