Elixir is for programmers • Hacker News Board

Re: Elixir is for programmers

#51

Post by metabrew » Sat, Dec 07, 2013, 11:00 PM UTC

alanning wrote: post #50

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?

It's pretty cool.. read the "Okay, but just how metaprogrammable are we talking?" section in this article: http://devintorr.es/blog/2013/06/11/elixir-its-not-about-syn...

Re: Elixir is for programmers

#52

Post by subleq » Sun, Dec 08, 2013, 3:51 AM UTC

Erwin wrote: post #16

If you liked the nice simple assert, you can get an imitation in Python tests using py.test: http://pytest.org/latest/assert.html Source code: def test_function(): assert f() == 4 Output: def test_function(): > assert f() == 4 E assert 3 == 4 E + where 3 = f() Here's how it works: http://pytest.org/latest/assert.html#assert-details -- when importing the test module, all simple asserts are rewritten (which has some li…

The problems with side effects have been fixed for a while: http://pybites.blogspot.com/2011/07/behind-scenes-of-pytests...

Re: Elixir is for programmers

#53

Post by vorg » Mon, Dec 09, 2013, 7:10 AM UTC

girvo wrote: post #45

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.

7 months ago, Groovy wasn't even in Tiobe's top 50. Two months ago (Oct 2013), it had reached #18. This month, it's back down to #46. The person who pulled off that trick didn't forget Groovy, and in fact utilized the feedback effect to keep the afterglow going. Just type "Groovy Programming" into Google and see some of the links...

5. www.infoworld.com Groovy breaks into top 20 list of programming languages

8. www.eweek.com Groovy Programming Language Sees Major Boost in Popularity

22. cacm.acm.org Groovy Programming Language Sees Major Boost in Popularity

24. jaxenter.com Groovy makes debut entry into programming language top twenty

30. glaforge.appspot.com Interview about Groovy's popularity boost -- Guillaume Laforge's Blog

But Groovy's "surge in popularity" was probably timed to coincide with a due diligence investigation on Pivotal Inc, or someone there selling a consulting contract.

"After a long discussion with one of the Tiobe index readers, it turned out that the data that is produced by one of the Chinese sites that we track is interpreted incorrectly by our algorithms. So this was a bug," Janssen said. "After we had fixed this bug, Groovy lost much of its ratings." http://www.infoworld.com/t/application-development/c-pulls-a...