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Elixir Livebook now as a desktop app

news.livebook.dev

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Re: Elixir Livebook now as a desktop app

#71

Post by throwawaymaths »

auraham wrote: post #65
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.

Yeah you could but it hasn't been done. I've struggled with jupyter/ipython for a decade. CRDTs like automerge and OTs exist, but they're not in jupyter.

It's simply put, not that easy to manage distributed live state in a sane fashion with python (see openstack), the programming model of the underlying language puts obstacles in your way. Meanwhile Erlang was created by a physicist who understood that the speed of light is a thing and consistency of data across distances is a real issue.

Re: Elixir Livebook now as a desktop app

#72

Post by josefrichter »

Scarbutt wrote: post #33
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.

Because of the Java ecosystem, in Clojure you are in much more advantageous position than with Elixir.

If you need high concurrency, heavy traffic, real-time system with high resilience, there’s probably nothing out there that comes even close to BEAM. It is definitely possible to write such a system in Java or Rust, but most likely at huge cost for something that you can get out of the box elsewhere. BEAM has narrower scope, but in that scope it’s probably far ahead of anything else.

Re: Elixir Livebook now as a desktop app

#73

Post by josefrichter »

chadrs wrote: post #58
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 have the opposite opinion. These things tend to get lost in my tabs.

Pin your tab.. But I hear you, having the same problem, there are trade-offs for sure.

Re: Elixir Livebook now as a desktop app

#74

Post by truncate »

Scarbutt wrote: post #33
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.

Because of the Java ecosystem, in Clojure you are in much more advantageous position than with Elixir.

Except using Java ecosystem as-is would not be idiomatic in Clojure, which means you need an ecosystem of wrapper libraries. I recall someone making similar argument on some other post, on how it adds more space for bugs, performance issues, and still making it hard to work with. The context was in comparison to Kotlin, where using Java ecosystem is much nicer experience.

Re: Elixir Livebook now as a desktop app

#75

Post by throwawaymaths »

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…

Do you use pagerduty? They're an elixir shop.

Re: Elixir Livebook now as a desktop app

#76

Post by commoner »

wojtekmach wrote: post #54
ch4s3 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No Linux download :-( They discussed it, but no one has taken it on yet. I think Wojtek Mach(the desktop initial author) is a mac user, and they actively wanted to provide a way for windows users to easily try it.

We don't plan to add Linux support ourselves at the moment but we'd love if someone contributed that. As was mentioned elsewhere it might be challenging to provide a bundle that works across different distributions so investigating the possible options would be an important first step.

An AppImage or Flatpak package would make a great starting point that works across distributions. Making Livebook more accessible to Linux developers would improve its adoption, as well as the adoption of Elixir, Phoenix, and Fly.io.

Re: Elixir Livebook now as a desktop app

#77

Post by sidpatil »

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.

This approach has been around a lot longer than Electron too. Privoxy, i2p, CUPS, etc. were/are all local-first software with Web-based interfaces.

Re: Elixir Livebook now as a desktop app

#78

Post by didibus »

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.

Neat, I didn't know about Discord. Whatsapp I thought it was all Erlang, are you sure about Elixir being prevalent there?

I wonder if it's only a few teams handling major events at Discord, or if that's truly their default backend service language all their backend teams uses. If so, maybe I should look at their job listings :p

Re: Elixir Livebook now as a desktop app

#79

Post by transfire »

Scarbutt wrote: post #33
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.

Because of the Java ecosystem, in Clojure you are in much more advantageous position than with Elixir.

I tend think the opposite. Developing for Android I found the Java build process and maintaining a solid development environment a headache. If that follows on to Clojure I can see why it wouldn’t be as popular even if the language itself is overall better.

Re: Elixir Livebook now as a desktop app

#80

Post by jolux »

didibus wrote: post #78
stu2b50 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Neat, I didn't know about Discord. Whatsapp I thought it was all Erlang, are you sure about Elixir being prevalent there? I wonder if it's only a few teams handling major events at Discord, or if that's truly their default backend service language all their backend teams uses. If so, maybe I should look at their job listings :p

I think they use Go too.
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