Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Elixir is for programmers

blog.pluralsight.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 53 posts

Re: Elixir is for programmers

#43

Post by specialist »

rdtsc wrote: post #2

I really like Elixir. Not only does it have a clean, pleasant syntax, macros, but it has all the good parts from Erlang, namely: * BEAM VM (isolated heaps, very well tuned scheduler, concurrent garbage collection) * Pattern matching, once you've tried it, it is hard to go back. * Ability to call Erlang code BEAM VM is really a secret gem and many didn't get a chance to play with it because they didn't like Erlang's s…

Thanks for the pattern matching tip. Will investigate.

I'm looking for a better way to navigate of graphs. Objects graphs, DOMs, parse trees.

Currently, I rely on iteration and glob style paths. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glob_(programming)

For instance, excerpt from https://code.google.com/p/lox/source/browse/trunk/test/lox/t...

  InputStream in = new FileInputStream( "./test/lox/test/zooinventory.xml" );
  Document doc = LOXHandler.load( in );
  List animals = doc.find( "Inventory/Animal" );
  System.out.println( "animals found: " + animals.size() );

  for( Element animal : animals )
  {
    String habitat = animal.findFirstString( "Habitat" );
    String lifestyle = animal.findFirstString( "Lifestyle" );
    ...
  }

  ...

  // Actual example of some globbing
  List names = doc.find( "Inventory/*/Name" );
  System.out.println( "names found: " + names.size() );
What I really want in a future language is for those glob paths to be first order objects, not magical strings. Then the compiler can do some sanity checking, editor can do autocompletion, etc.

Warning: Lightweight Objects for XML is a personal project, very alpha. https://code.google.com/p/lox/

Re: Elixir is for programmers

#44

Post by desireco42 »

jasonlotito wrote: post #24
knewter wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what I came here to say. All of the 'raw language' niceties that Geoffrey mentioned in the article are true, but for me one of the greatest things in Elixir is processes. Just, the way the Erlang system operates is so well thought out, I'm more impressed every time I learn something new. Shameless self-promotion here - I run http://www.elixirsips.com , which is a screencast series that releases 2 new episodes…

I'm a subscriber to Elixir Sips, and just wanted to say that the videos are well worth it to anyone looking to get into Elixir. I'm a happy subscriber, and look forward to more videos. knewter doesn't know me, and I don't know him.

Thank you for this resource.

Re: Elixir is for programmers

#45

Post by girvo »

twic wrote: post #42

FWIW, Groovy also has those smart asserts. They're nice. Not a big enough deal that i'd start a feature list with them, but nice.

Groovy seems like such a... Forgotten language, sometimes. For what it's worth, I've always really liked it. And I hate Java with the fire of one thousand suns.

Re: Elixir is for programmers

#46

Post by elbear »

rdtsc wrote: post #32
john2x wrote: post #23

Ever since I started getting into Clojure, I've been getting interested in these other functional programming languages. Lately I've been checking out Elixir. I don't know what draws me to it (most likely the pretty website and logo :P, and partly because I hate the Java ecosystem). I want to get into it as well, but I just don't see myself using it for anything? I mean for the types of problems I'm capable of solvin…

> Is there any other use case for Erlang/Elixir? Yes, the use case is usually for highly concurrent system. There just happen to be quite a few of those in recent years. Multiple things happening at the same time colloquially speaking. Now it won't be good for fast concurrent problems, like say multiplying matrices, or computing FFT, you'd use a GPU and Fortran for that perhaps. But think of large game server with mu…

Your message got cut off.

Re: Elixir is for programmers

#47

Post by felixgallo »

elbear wrote: post #46
rdtsc wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is there any other use case for Erlang/Elixir? Yes, the use case is usually for highly concurrent system. There just happen to be quite a few of those in recent years. Multiple things happening at the same time colloquially speaking. Now it won't be good for fast concurrent problems, like say multiplying matrices, or computing FFT, you'd use a GPU and Fortran for that perhaps. But think of large game server with mu…

Your message got cut off.

he forgot to trap exit.

Re: Elixir is for programmers

#48

Post by bitwalker »

I recently started programming in Elixir. I chose to rewrite the customized Hubot instance I'm running at my company from the ground up in it - it's been a great way to learn the language, and especially OTP.

OTP is really what makes Elixir (and Erlang for that matter) so impressive. Supervised, lightweight processes just seems so obvious as a solution to fault tolerance and concurrency - coming from C#, where doing multi-threaded programming is error-prone at best, Elixir/OTP is a dream. I do miss the type system from C# or Scala, but type specifications help to mitigate the loss.

The one other feature that has been really pleasing to work with is pattern matching. Scala is the only other language I've used with some form of it, and after using Elixir/Erlang's pattern matching, Scala's seems deficient in comparison. It's an insanely powerful construct, I wish more languages had it.

Re: Elixir is for programmers

#50

Post by alanning »

I'm very interested in Elixir but I'm having trouble understanding the benefit of the 'upcase' example at the end of the article. Compared to a single function with a conversion table, a function per character seems like a tremendous amount of overhead.

Is the purpose of implementing upcase this way to make it more easily parallelizeable in the map/reduce sense?

Post reply on HN