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Switching to Elixir

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Re: Switching to Elixir

#81

Post by POiNTx »

kimi wrote: post #67
gigatexal wrote: post #30

“In fact, I might go as far as saying that Elixir gives you a fun language (like Ruby) while leaving out the stateful footguns OOP languages give you. There are no classes, no instances, no inheritance…it's immutable and functional and you're not bogged down by a static type system.” I want this but with types. I’m convinced strongly typed is the way to go for larger code bases as it hides the magic of a lot of thing…

I'm a contrarian here. I really wished we had inheritance in Elixir for GenServers - because those are objects, interacting out of messages and not just glorified structs with associated functions. So I wish I could have a generic template for a project's GenServer (for basic common registration, memory configuration, logging), that is specialized for a specific task, of which there are three flavours. Speaking of fo…

Behaviours might be what you're looking for, they're the closest thing to inheritance in Elixir.

And you're absolutely right about genservers being objects :)

Re: Switching to Elixir

#82

Post by riffraff »

jb3689 wrote: post #76
zoogeny wrote: post #56

I have been watching Elixir YouTube videos pretty much every day for the last few weeks. I guess there was an Elixir conference recently and after I watched a couple, YouTube has been sending me a consistent stream of Elixir content. I really want to try out this language. I love the idea of Erlang but the few times I've had to deal with it (an ejabberd chat server was one) I found it to be a bit too quirky. Every vi…

You are overthinking some of it at least when it comes to concurrency. Look at what a process is and how send works. GenServer is a natural generalization of a pattern you’d write a thousand times. Knowledge of actors is transferable. Go has libraries which implement actor abstractions for example. Process mailboxes are just message queues like Go’s channels are. There are differences with respect to how the interpre…

Why do you think riak was well ahead of its time? (actual question, I'm not arguing)

IIRC it was a few years after the dynamo paper came out, and at a time when a bunch of other nosql+high scalability solutions did (e.g. Cassandra)

Re: Switching to Elixir

#83

Post by da39a3ee »

> There are no classes, no instances, no inheritance

I don't know anything about Elixir, but it bothers me when people claim that languages like Rust and Go are "not object oriented". If you create structs and have special syntax for defining functions that operate on instances of those structs, then those are called objects and you are doing OOP. Just because some Java people came up with a definition of OOP that says it has to have inheritance, doesn't mean you actually have to pay attention to their definition.

Re: Switching to Elixir

#84

Post by porker »

zoogeny wrote: post #70
throwawaymaths wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> looking at the magic of LiveView (and LiveBook) What's the magic? I think it's pretty easy to get a correct mental model of everything in livebook maybe excepting exact details of how the diff calculation/data compression works. Even so, you can spy on the websocket messages and get a reasonable picture of what's going on in a pinch. Liveview is incredibly straightforward.

> Liveview is incredibly straightforward. I don't agree. One of the keynotes from the 2023 ElixirConf was Chris McCord (one of the principle developers of LiveView) describing how it is almost 1.0 [1]. One thing that made me laugh a bit was him emphasizing how much Javascript he's had to write (he was referencing the fact that there is an internal community meme that you can achieve such incredible behaviors without…

LiveView is optional though and IMO is still overused for tasks that would be better accomplished with client side JS.

Where this gets messy is mixing LiveView and client side JS, and I need to experiment further with this (or find people who have).

Re: Switching to Elixir

#85

Post by mijamo »

byhemechi wrote: post #34

I often see people say static typing slows them down and I'd really like to know why that is because for me it's the exact opposite, I really don't like not knowing what format data is in. I'd much rather have to write slightly more verbose code and have a vast number of possible errors caught at compile time instead of having things go wrong in production when someone inputs something a bit weird with nothing so muc…

I think it vastly depends what you're writing. Any kind of function that does not have a fixed input and output gets a lot more complex with static types. And by extension any code that depends on that also gets more complex.

I tried at some point to use Rust for an API but then I depended on making calls to a very complex API. In JavaScript I would have just gotten back a complex object where I can then pick whatever I want progressively through object access methods. In Rust I ended up with more than 500 lines of type definition for the API and it still wasn't enough so I gave up. It is a bit extreme but when you work with an API from an ERP for instance you can get very very complex and extensive types that are not in your control and not very well specified.

Another good example is how complex all ORM internal code get once they try to add static typing. The typing in the ORMs code feels like black magic because they would really really need types as code but don't have it so have to rely on a bunch of crazy generic combinators.

Re: Switching to Elixir

#86

Post by jwells89 »

byhemechi wrote: post #34

I often see people say static typing slows them down and I'd really like to know why that is because for me it's the exact opposite, I really don't like not knowing what format data is in. I'd much rather have to write slightly more verbose code and have a vast number of possible errors caught at compile time instead of having things go wrong in production when someone inputs something a bit weird with nothing so muc…

In my experience, static typing takes a different way of thinking that can take a while to get the hang of, and during that adjustment period a lot of people are going to significantly slower. I definitely felt it coming into Swift, being used to Objective-C and to a lesser extent Ruby.

Having grown accustomed to static typing, not encountering errors until runtime, or worse having errors manifest as type-related misbehavior and potentially not be immediately apparent is much more frustrating than it used to be.

Re: Switching to Elixir

#87

Post by kimi »

POiNTx wrote: post #81
kimi wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a contrarian here. I really wished we had inheritance in Elixir for GenServers - because those are objects, interacting out of messages and not just glorified structs with associated functions. So I wish I could have a generic template for a project's GenServer (for basic common registration, memory configuration, logging), that is specialized for a specific task, of which there are three flavours. Speaking of fo…

Behaviours might be what you're looking for, they're the closest thing to inheritance in Elixir. And you're absolutely right about genservers being objects :)

They are, but it's not as natural as A specializes B that specializes C.

Re: Switching to Elixir

#88

Post by [deleted] »

jbmsf wrote: post #39
superdisk wrote: post #14

For me the big sell of Elixir/Erlang is that it makes running "background jobs" a complete breeze with no concern for blocking IO bringing the entire server to a halt, especially in a web server context. At my last job I had to do a bunch of HTTP requests in a webhook handler and if enough happened at once, the entire site would just crash due to all the OS processes being busy. I found myself desperately wishing I w…

Meh. I don't want background jobs to be a breeze in quite this way. I want background work to live on different compute capacity than http requests, both because they have very different resources usage and because I want to have state or queues in front of background work so there's a well-defined process for retry, error handling, and back-pressure. I get it, of course, it'd be lovely if these complications didn't…

[deleted]

Re: Switching to Elixir

#89

Post by olivermuty »

mijamo wrote: post #85
byhemechi wrote: post #34

I often see people say static typing slows them down and I'd really like to know why that is because for me it's the exact opposite, I really don't like not knowing what format data is in. I'd much rather have to write slightly more verbose code and have a vast number of possible errors caught at compile time instead of having things go wrong in production when someone inputs something a bit weird with nothing so muc…

I think it vastly depends what you're writing. Any kind of function that does not have a fixed input and output gets a lot more complex with static types. And by extension any code that depends on that also gets more complex. I tried at some point to use Rust for an API but then I depended on making calls to a very complex API. In JavaScript I would have just gotten back a complex object where I can then pick whateve…

Elixir dev here, just to put the context in place first hehe.

Couldn’t that thing be typed as the web format? A nested set of string props with either string or number types in the leaves.

Then use those types to traverse and pull into «real» types?

I like to put structured data into structs in elixir too and the above is essentially what I would do in Elixir.

I don’t know rust well enough to see if I am missing some nuance

Re: Switching to Elixir

#90

Post by conradfr »

hosh wrote: post #72
zoogeny wrote: post #56

I have been watching Elixir YouTube videos pretty much every day for the last few weeks. I guess there was an Elixir conference recently and after I watched a couple, YouTube has been sending me a consistent stream of Elixir content. I really want to try out this language. I love the idea of Erlang but the few times I've had to deal with it (an ejabberd chat server was one) I found it to be a bit too quirky. Every vi…

I went from Ruby to Elixir to Nodejs. I am writing Nodejs because I have to, not because I want to. Having used it now, I will never ever start a new project with it. Nodejs's concurrency controls, ability to scale, tools for reliability and observability are so far behind from the BEAM ecosystem. I sometimes think people think Elixir is too good to be true because they're too used to platforms not designed to be res…

Elixir is definitely a better Nodejs... that JS developers don't know about.
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