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

From Python to Elixir Machine Learning

thestackcanary.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–89 of 89 posts

Re: From Python to Elixir Machine Learning

#81

Post by pythonaut_16 »

gv83 wrote: post #74
parthdesai wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It also requires a different way of exploring code as you can't do the familiar `.` and see what happens, you can't just do `price.toCentsValue` but need to do `price |> Price.toCentsValue` and so you need to know the existence of the `Price` module, which might not exist and be buried in `Cart` or as an helper in some controller because you did not understand clearly the domain and the modules responsibilities. At…

I'm not really picking anything, just sharing how it went with elixir in my org. I'm sure we could have done better, but the pit of success was not there for the polyglot teams. the elixir-only teams did a bit better, but mostly they just learned the ecosystem and then GTFO'ed out to greener pastures since they just wanted to write elixir and only elixir. about your specific counterpoint, I think it's partially valid…

Thanks for sharing!

We could certainly debate the objective merits of Elixir vs other languages (which seems to be the primary discourse in this thread and elsewhere) but hearing subjective developer experiences is also critical.

It doesn't matter if Elixir is objectively better or not, if lots of devs who are exposed to it are having a hard time it's worth asking why.

In addition to developers not wanting to expend additional effort to learn a new language or paradigm, I believe there are gaps in the ecosystem especially around medium-advanced topics.

Re: From Python to Elixir Machine Learning

#82

Post by pythonaut_16 »

throwawaymaths wrote: post #77
gv83 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

absolutely, that's what I said when I talked about strong org support. also, if you don't have strong org support, you risk getting onboard people that just want to work with that specific technology that WILL gtfo as soon as they need to change team to one that doesn't use it, or if the technology is sunset, etc., so it's even more risky to have an exotic stack in the middle of more common stacks

This is a problem, that needs to be fixed in tech management. Tech managers need to trust their dev talent. It's like a self fulfilling prophecy. Elixir is risky, so let's move off of it ==> devs leave. Elixir seems risky. And then the devs/ecosystem gets blamed.

Also a risk of polyglot environments. You can easily end up with teams that lack deep knowledge of the languages and libraries you're using.

Re: From Python to Elixir Machine Learning

#83

Post by jrmiii »

pythonaut_16 wrote: post #81
gv83 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not really picking anything, just sharing how it went with elixir in my org. I'm sure we could have done better, but the pit of success was not there for the polyglot teams. the elixir-only teams did a bit better, but mostly they just learned the ecosystem and then GTFO'ed out to greener pastures since they just wanted to write elixir and only elixir. about your specific counterpoint, I think it's partially valid…

Thanks for sharing! We could certainly debate the objective merits of Elixir vs other languages (which seems to be the primary discourse in this thread and elsewhere) but hearing subjective developer experiences is also critical. It doesn't matter if Elixir is objectively better or not, if lots of devs who are exposed to it are having a hard time it's worth asking why. In addition to developers not wanting to expend…

I'd be interested to hear what some of those gaps are from your perspective, as they represent opportunities for community creators.

In other words, what resources do you wish existed?

Re: From Python to Elixir Machine Learning

#84

Post by pmarreck »

pawelduda wrote: post #52
pawelduda wrote: post #18

I use Elixir for a long time and wouldn't recommend it for ML over Python. Yes, maybe Elixir has some advantages and solutions for pain points because of VM architecture and other subjective reasons but doesn't come close to what Python offers in terms of tooling, support, community. Also, if you juggle more complex data in Elixir, it's something that you need to get used to coming from Python, it will be much much d…

I can no longer edit parent post so to further elaborate on tooling: even if Elixir was comparable to Python (let's assume it's true as of today), there is a lot going on in AI, so that won't necessarily be true tomorrow. There is no doubt Elixir will always be slower to catch up to recent development because of smaller community. This also applies to how quickly issues will be resolved as they appear. It's likely OK…

your reasoning is basically "it's not popular enough"

your flaw of reasoning can be trivially pointed out simply by explaining that once upon a time, Python was NOT "the language for machine learning". Essentially, NO "X is the solution for Y" started out that way. Which is why appeals to popularity are a fallacy.

Re: From Python to Elixir Machine Learning

#85

Post by pmarreck »

gv83 wrote: post #53
pythonaut_16 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you expand on what you mean by this? Module design doesn't seem any harder than class design in JS or Python. Do you mean the language is generally harder for non-developers? Or that Elixir is harder for JS/Python developers to pick up and write good code? Or something else? Writing well designed Elixir code does seem to require a fairly different approach from most common OO languages, at least at a surface le…

sure thing! I'll try to make points related to what I observed and experienced in my org, starting with one huge huge huge preamble which is: I work in an average org with average joe devs. an average joe dev to me is someone who "just wants a job" and is not very interested in furthering its own professional development or learning new things unless trained & forced by the job. it's perfectly fine to be an average d…

> I work in an average org with average joe devs. an average joe dev to me is someone who "just wants a job" and is not very interested in furthering its own professional development or learning new things unless trained & forced by the job

so basically you're all doing things you hate, which is literally the worst possible work environment, and you're trying to use this as a data point for why Elixir "isn't for average coders". I have news for you, dude, you're not even at the "average coders" level, you just work in a "code mill", I'm guessing India.

Re: From Python to Elixir Machine Learning

#86

Post by pmarreck »

suryong wrote: post #62
gv83 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sure thing! I'll try to make points related to what I observed and experienced in my org, starting with one huge huge huge preamble which is: I work in an average org with average joe devs. an average joe dev to me is someone who "just wants a job" and is not very interested in furthering its own professional development or learning new things unless trained & forced by the job. it's perfectly fine to be an average d…

The org I work at has the same issue with Elm, there is one Elm product and no one really wants to take those tickets because everyone hates dealing with it. It has become a total pain in the ass, and I believe someone is rewriting the app in React

I'm guessing the people who actually love Elm left.

You really do have to love a paradigm to work with it, because paradigm shifts have a cost. Elm's paradigm shift is "do everything declaratively/immutably/non-side-effecty" and the massive (IMHO) benefit of going about things that way is "no runtime errors" (!!!) in addition to quite performant code.

But yes, the cost is there, and it is that you sometimes just want a side-effect to get something done, you sometimes just want to call into another library to get something done, etc.

The thing is, if Elm allowed this, or made it easier, you'd lose the Elm guarantee of "no runtime errors". Which, frankly, is a pretty big one- just inspect any popular domain's web page and you're likely to see dozens of JS errors that are simply hidden from most users, contributing to a "janky" web experience.

I literally just inspected this very page I'm typing this comment on and I see:

    This page is in Quirks Mode. Page layout may be impacted. For Standards Mode use “”.
    Error: Promised response from onMessage listener went out of scope
The cost of perfection is high. You really have to love the ideal.

But yes, if no one does, then Elm is a boondoggle.

I'm dealing with something similar with NixOS. NixOS's big guarantee (which is also big) is basically "no build or runtime failures that are due to misconfigured dependencies". But there's a steep learning curve and scattered documentation. The core idea is amazing, though, and that's what I love. The rest I tolerate while climbing the mountain.

Re: From Python to Elixir Machine Learning

#87

Post by gv83 »

pmarreck wrote: post #85
gv83 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sure thing! I'll try to make points related to what I observed and experienced in my org, starting with one huge huge huge preamble which is: I work in an average org with average joe devs. an average joe dev to me is someone who "just wants a job" and is not very interested in furthering its own professional development or learning new things unless trained & forced by the job. it's perfectly fine to be an average d…

> I work in an average org with average joe devs. an average joe dev to me is someone who "just wants a job" and is not very interested in furthering its own professional development or learning new things unless trained & forced by the job so basically you're all doing things you hate, which is literally the worst possible work environment, and you're trying to use this as a data point for why Elixir "isn't for aver…

you have an absolutely skewed perception of average in our field. I'm guessing "less than 3 years of experience".

nevermind the random stab, it's just to make you understand how random some answers are. in any case, no one is trying to touch your precious language, if you can't understand the context in which elixir failed (hot startup that HAD to hire everyone and its dog in 3 months + polyglot environment), not my problem

Re: From Python to Elixir Machine Learning

#88

Post by paulluuk »

sodapopcan wrote: post #47
paulluuk wrote: post #40

Show me I can save a considerable amount of time training a 70b parameter huggingface model by switching to Elixir, then we can talk about me learning a new language.

Seems like you didn't read even the first line as this article is directed at people already using Elixir who are currently doing ML stuff with Python.

I did actually read most of the article. Did you read the section immediately after that?

> Why is Python not Sufficient?

It then proceeds to make a case why Python would not have enough speed or support for parallel processing, which is what I'm disputing.

Re: From Python to Elixir Machine Learning

#89

Post by thibaut_barrere »

gv83 wrote: post #36
thibaut_barrere wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I come from Ruby but the reactions can be similar, happy to give my data point. The thing is Elixir is really good at an increasing number of things. If you need to write a HTTP proxy in the middle of your application, since Elixir processes & incoming HTTP workers are cheap, you do not need to go evented: it just works. If you need to have reactive web apps with automated changes pushed to the client, it's the same:…

still not easy at the most important thing of all: being approachable, instrumented and intuitive to people less dedicated to programming. I say this as someone that likes elixir, but after seeing it failing miserably at my org, I'm very skeptical it can be thrown around like a spring or node or django project. It needs real support from the org and requires module design skills that are not present in most random de…

I do agree with the need to make it more approachable indeed.

It is too much a "language of experts" at the moment, although it is not caused by the language itself, more by the topics covered in general.

Post reply on HN