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

Elixir 1.9

elixir-lang.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 174 posts

Re: Elixir 1.9

#91

Post by pdimitar »

zerr wrote: post #84
nickjj wrote: post #39

If anyone is on the fence on learning Elixir / Phoenix (Elixir's most popular web framework library) please do yourself a favor and give it a shot. If you're on a time crunch and want the best bang for your buck on "why bother learning yet another language to write web apps in?" then watch this talk called "The Soul of Erlang and Elixir": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvBT4XBdoUE I'm not affiliated with the languag…

The thing is, nowadays, statically typed languages became so ergonomic, there is really no reason to go with dynamic languages.

I partially agree, but none have the preemptive green threads of the BEAM VM and its amazing tooling around supervisors and worker hierarchies.

Trust me, if somebody puts that in Go, Rust or OCaml -- I'd ditch Elixir tomorrow.

The BEAM VM is just too good. You can have thousands of smaller tasks running in parallel and nothing lags until you hit the physical limits of the hardware -- which 99% of the apps never do.

Re: Elixir 1.9

#92

Post by derefr »

ksec wrote: post #28
jerf wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"no one wants a language to stagnate" In the sense of the language itself, I do. The language community should keep growing, libraries, frameworks, etc., but I'd like to see more languages qua languages declare themselves "done" sooner and more often, or failing a sudden cutoff, start seriously raising the bar on the next "new feature". There's a lot of good languages out there that were great in years 5-15 and then…

"no one wants a language ecosystem to stagnate" I used to be so happy when there was a new Java version every year, something new is good, something better is good, some hype is good. Now I am getting old I just want to use the same tools for the next 15 years. I mean it is not like most of the problem we are trying to solves were limited by the languages itself. ( Mostly the ecosystem around it )

A difference with Java is that new Java releases tend to come with changes to the JVM. The language's semantics and the abstract machine are intertwined in a way where the JVM might be changed to enable a new language feature, or vice-versa. And the JVM itself improving is pretty much always an unalloyed good, so people tend to look forward to releases of Java to see what JVM improvements it has in store.

Elixir doesn't hold the same position for its abstract machine. BEAM, the abstract machine, has its development intertwined with that of Erlang's language development, but not-so-much with Elixir's. Elixir can stabilize while BEAM+Erlang continue to evolve "underneath" it. Given that Erlang syntax is pretty much† always valid Elixir syntax, Elixir doesn't even need to change to expose new Erlang stuff!

† There were big changes when maps were introduced, but another change of that scale seems unlikely at this point. (Unless Erlang gets a mutable byte-array type or something.)

Re: Elixir 1.9

#93

Post by giancarlostoro »

RexM wrote: post #88
giancarlostoro wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing I love about Elixir is I had read the Erlang book from Joe Armstrong ages back, and a lot of ideas and concepts still apply. I just didn't get into Phoenix cause PGSQL is a PITA on Windows, so I have to go back and try with MySQL instead.

What issues are you having getting Postgres setup in Windows? I've used the Windows installer[1] and have had no issues. [1]: https://www.postgresql.org/download/windows/

I was unable to figure out how to setup accounts, and I am not used to PostgreSQL, I couldnt figure out my root password, which I swear was just "developer" but that didn't seem to work. I'm used to other database engines, despite my love of the idea of using PGSQL.

Re: Elixir 1.9

#94

Post by derefr »

comboy wrote: post #52
faitswulff wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess Elixir is "done" then? What could be the downsides to this?

Lack of language improvement. Sure, you can do anything with macros, but then when you open some random open source library it may be using different macros (or macros that are named the same way but act differently) than those that you use. Putting something in the language forces everybody to use the same standard. It can be good and it can be bad.

There's a middle-ground stance that's pretty common in the Elixir ecosystem: five or six libraries get written to solve a problem over the course of a year or two, people play around with them, and then a common set of primitives gets factored out of those libraries and made into an interchange library that all those libs support.

That interchange library can then be integrated into the Elixir stdlib—that's what happened with DateTimes in Elixir—but there's no reason it needs to be. It works just as well to just keep the interchange-type library as its own tiny little dependency that all these libraries pull in.

Re: Elixir 1.9

#95

Post by RexM »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #93
RexM wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What issues are you having getting Postgres setup in Windows? I've used the Windows installer[1] and have had no issues. [1]: https://www.postgresql.org/download/windows/

I was unable to figure out how to setup accounts, and I am not used to PostgreSQL, I couldnt figure out my root password, which I swear was just "developer" but that didn't seem to work. I'm used to other database engines, despite my love of the idea of using PGSQL.

Ah ok. Maybe it's because my install was basic without additional accounts. I just have my phoenix apps setup to use the default postgres/postgres login.

Re: Elixir 1.9

#96

Post by giancarlostoro »

RexM wrote: post #95
giancarlostoro wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was unable to figure out how to setup accounts, and I am not used to PostgreSQL, I couldnt figure out my root password, which I swear was just "developer" but that didn't seem to work. I'm used to other database engines, despite my love of the idea of using PGSQL.

Ah ok. Maybe it's because my install was basic without additional accounts. I just have my phoenix apps setup to use the default postgres/postgres login.

For some reason I remember having this PGSQL issue a couple of times on Windows, so I may either go with MySQL or what others suggested with WSL / Vagrant. Also I always forget database passwords after a week if it's not saved somewhere.

Re: Elixir 1.9

#97

Post by m45t3r »

freehunter wrote: post #83
nickjj wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way I've learned so far was building my own app while skimming the docs and looking at successful open source projects like https://github.com/thechangelog/changelog.com for inspiration and guidance. Basically error driven development and looking up things as needed. Of course also taking advantage of IRC / Slack / Forums when I get really stuck. But recently I read the Programming Phoenix 1.4 book (written by th…

Glowing recommendation, I'll have to check it out!

I concur. Programming Phoenix (I read the old version, 1.2 or 1.3, don't remember) and it is simply so well thought and helps you understand why Phoenix is not as magic as its appears in the start.

I also recommend you to try to play with Plug. Things make much more sense in Phoenix after you understand how Plug works.

Re: Elixir 1.9

#98

Post by pdimitar »

gamache wrote: post #33
atonse wrote: post #4

This is great news! The deployment story has progressively improved since I started using Elixir in 2016, but the best way is to just have _one_ community blessed system. Distillery has helped a lot for sure, so it's nice that it's basically been rolled into the base elixir distro.

> Distillery has helped a lot for sure, so it's nice that it's basically been rolled into the base elixir distro. That would be nice if it were true. However, for better or worse, Distillery was Not Invented Here, so what Elixir shipped with today is a reimplementation of the simple half of Distillery.

Or, you know, the creators want one official blessed way so as not to fragment the ecosystem, so they integrated part of Distillery upstream in the language itself.

Re: Elixir 1.9

#99

Post by skissane »

andy_ppp wrote: post #17
superdisk wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, what? I wrote an Elixir/Phoenix webapp around 2015 and one of the major selling points was the ability to hot-upgrade code that was inherited from Erlang. What changed?

The problem with hot code updates is they can break your app if your structs change shape and are extremely hard to get right over a period of time. Best to do rolling deployments with Kubenetes or something...

> The problem with hot code updates is they can break your app if your structs change shape

I have no experience with Erlang/Elixir myself, so please excuse me if this is a silly question – but, why can't the language/platform actually detect the difference in struct shape, and refuse to deploy the new version in that case? Or, demand that you provide some sort of conversion function that maps the old struct to the new one? Is this a consequence of lack of static typing?

Re: Elixir 1.9

#100

Post by alskdj21 »

As someone who's new to web dev, is there any incentives in going for Elixir than using those established languages(i.e. Node, Ruby)? Any book/sources recommendations?
Post reply on HN