Elixir Livebook now as a desktop app • Hacker News Board

Re: Elixir Livebook now as a desktop app

#61

Post by hactar_ » Tue, Aug 02, 2022, 10:05 PM UTC

stu2b50 wrote: post #59

didibus wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems making a Lisp popular is an impossible task. That said, I'm not sure if the data agrees with you. I think Clojure is more popular and widely used at this time. Not sure, but I think from what I remember of the few rankings, and just the fact I don't know an equivalent success story to NuBank for Elixir, I think maybe Clojure is at the moment more popular in practice. But with the amazing learning material El…

In terms of major companies using Elixir, Discord and Whatsapp are built with it. Whatsapp is slowly chipping away at its Elixir for infra homogeneity reasons with the rest of facebook but discord is still all aboard the Elixir train.

WhatsApp uses mostly erlang if I recall correctly.

Re: Elixir Livebook now as a desktop app

#62

Post by throwawaymaths » Tue, Aug 02, 2022, 10:15 PM UTC

jolux wrote: post #53

thejosh wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've wondered whether it's easier to add data analyst stuff to Elixir that Python seems to have, or add features to Python that Erlang (and by extension Elixir) provides out of the box. By what I can see, if you want multiprocessing on Python in an easier way (let's say running async), you have to use something like ray core[0], then if you want multiple machines you need redis(?). Elixir/Erlang supports this out of…

Definitely easier to add Pandas to Elixir than preemptively scheduled green threads to Python.

Plus sane failure domains: go has had preemptively scheduled green threads from day one but failure domains are really not a thing in go.

Re: Elixir Livebook now as a desktop app

#63

Post by stu2b50 » Tue, Aug 02, 2022, 10:21 PM UTC

varispeed wrote: post #52

Any tips why would you want to learn Elixir or what would you use it for? I tried to learn it a couple of years ago. Bought a book and couldn't shake the impression that it was created to be complex and hard to reason about or maybe I am wrong and it is "easy", but has a steep learning curve? That being said, I looked at Go around the same time and I clicked instantly. Easy to read, simple and yet powerful.

It shines at creating highly concurrent applications with a great deal of built in features to provide reliability and resilience. Sounds a lot like a server, and that's what much of the modern use for Elixir is. In particular, one area where it shines is stateful, long-lived requests (e.g, websockets) where many other concurrency models will either rely much more on databases to track state or potentially get choked up.

If nothing else it's neat to learn as one of the few somewhat well used languages in modern times that actually adheres to Alan Kay's original conception of OOP.

Re: Elixir Livebook now as a desktop app

#64

Post by auraham » Tue, Aug 02, 2022, 11:24 PM UTC

lvass wrote: post #16

I love the concept of local Web servers as GUI substitutes, and hope we get many more of those. Tachidesk is my favorite example. Thanks to Phoenix Liveview, Elixir is becoming a great option in this space. This method gives us every benefit of Electron and almost none of the downsides.

I feel the same. Wonder if the author can provide a bare-bones repository/template with Elixir and WxWidgets to create similar apps.

Re: Elixir Livebook now as a desktop app

#65

Post by auraham » Tue, Aug 02, 2022, 11:28 PM UTC

throwawaymaths wrote: post #34

It would be crazy awesome if someone could figure out how to layer python underneath this. There is a very nice feature set in livebook that doesn't really exist in jupyter.

As others pointed out, the app uses wxWidgets for the UI and Elixir for backend, along with Phoenix. I think similar apps can be created using wxWidgets with Python by replacing Phoenix with another framework, maybe Flask or Django.

Re: Elixir Livebook now as a desktop app

#66

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Aug 02, 2022, 11:49 PM UTC

didibus wrote: post #56

xcambar wrote: post #19

The Elixir ecosystem is growing incredibly well. I am impressed both from an engineering and a product perspective. It shows that they are playing the long game. I think they are achieving what I wished happen to the Clojure ecosystem: productive, well designed, respected and popular. Clojure missed the last step, unfortunately.

It seems making a Lisp popular is an impossible task. That said, I'm not sure if the data agrees with you. I think Clojure is more popular and widely used at this time. Not sure, but I think from what I remember of the few rankings, and just the fact I don't know an equivalent success story to NuBank for Elixir, I think maybe Clojure is at the moment more popular in practice. But with the amazing learning material El…

[deleted]

Re: Elixir Livebook now as a desktop app

#67

Post by MarkMarine » Wed, Aug 03, 2022, 12:24 AM UTC

This idea is incredible, and extensible beyond these notebooks. I’d like to see something like this as a general code authoring/collaboration tool, would be nice to see when I’m working in the same code as a co-worker, or supercharged pair programming. Obviously scaled too large this would be chaos, but on a 6 person team I think this would be killer.

Re: Elixir Livebook now as a desktop app

#68

Post by z9znz » Wed, Aug 03, 2022, 12:38 AM UTC

xcambar wrote: post #19

The Elixir ecosystem is growing incredibly well. I am impressed both from an engineering and a product perspective. It shows that they are playing the long game. I think they are achieving what I wished happen to the Clojure ecosystem: productive, well designed, respected and popular. Clojure missed the last step, unfortunately.

> Clojure missed the last step

Oddly, it seems to me that Clojure (the established people in its community) don't really care if anyone is attracted to it.

It seems like the people who come to Clojure do so because they caught a glimpse of it somewhere, did some digging and searching, and decided to give it a try. Not exactly the same as Sun spending $500 million to market Java.

That's not to suggest the Clojure community is unwelcoming or silent, but they generally fly under the radar.

Several years ago I went to a few of the Amsterdam Clojure meetup group meetings, and at that time there were 10 to 20 people there.

Meanwhile, the Elixir meetup would have 20-40! And Elixir was still comparatively young. Of course the Ruby meetup group was even larger, but that's no surprise given the prevalence of Rails in business.

Re: Elixir Livebook now as a desktop app

#69

Post by z9znz » Wed, Aug 03, 2022, 12:42 AM UTC

didibus wrote: post #56

xcambar wrote: post #19

The Elixir ecosystem is growing incredibly well. I am impressed both from an engineering and a product perspective. It shows that they are playing the long game. I think they are achieving what I wished happen to the Clojure ecosystem: productive, well designed, respected and popular. Clojure missed the last step, unfortunately.

It seems making a Lisp popular is an impossible task. That said, I'm not sure if the data agrees with you. I think Clojure is more popular and widely used at this time. Not sure, but I think from what I remember of the few rankings, and just the fact I don't know an equivalent success story to NuBank for Elixir, I think maybe Clojure is at the moment more popular in practice. But with the amazing learning material El…

I would think that NuBank would want to market and promote Clojure to ensure that there would be ample numbers of Clojure developers (since NuBank depends on a lot of Clojure code). Perhaps they do market Clojure in Brazil, but I don't see it elsewhere...

Re: Elixir Livebook now as a desktop app

#70

Post by dr_kiszonka » Wed, Aug 03, 2022, 12:54 AM UTC

thejosh wrote: post #43

freedomben wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, and I think their move into ML is a genius move that is going to make elixir mainstream. I'm super excited for the future.

I've wondered whether it's easier to add data analyst stuff to Elixir that Python seems to have, or add features to Python that Erlang (and by extension Elixir) provides out of the box. By what I can see, if you want multiprocessing on Python in an easier way (let's say running async), you have to use something like ray core[0], then if you want multiple machines you need redis(?). Elixir/Erlang supports this out of…

[I have no experience with Elixir.] Would that be possible to have elixir intelligently manage multiprocessing of python scripts? I would be especially interested in being able to have the scripts talk to each other, but have no idea how it could work, besides perhaps having them communicate by writing to / reading from the same files, which seems risky.