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Elixir v1.10

elixir-lang.org

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Re: Elixir v1.10

#91

Post by bglusman »

histriosum wrote: post #89

I've been tempted a few times to dip my toes into Elixir -- I like the language and the BEAM concepts, but in my environment I always bump into the following concern.. Ecto v3 has been out for more than a year now, and there are still only two supported adapters.. MySQL and Postgres. In my environment, I use a lot of MSSQL and SQLite in addition to Postgres, and those adapters haven't been successfully ported over to…

I guess it depends on your needs and motivation... we recently completed the transition from Ecto2 to Ecto3, and while not totally trivial in our case, I think you could do in a way that wasn't hard if you maintained compatibility with both from the start, so that only config had to change. But also, what are your requirements for using SQLite and/or MSSQL? Are you looking at porting existing projects, or new services talking to existing production databases? It used to be common in Rails to use SQLite in development and in production use Postgres or MySQL, but I think everyone kind of acknowledges its better now to run the same database in local and production if possible, and it's so easy that motivation is gone. I once had to use MSSQL in production for a HIPPA compliance issue, so I understand that might be hard to avoid in some situations, and SQLite is certainly well suited to some embedded applications, but you could certainly try and work on porting the ecto 2 SQLite and/or MSSQL adapter from ecto2 to ecto3 as a project and I'm sure the community would be very supportive in helping if you have motivation. I might be interested in helping with SQLite, but I don't have any specific motivation so I'm not likely to start it on my own.

Re: Elixir v1.10

#92

Post by dnautics »

happy_path wrote: post #32
neillyons wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alchemist Camp has good video tutorials https://alchemist.camp Also this blog post helped my understanding http://www.petecorey.com/blog/2019/05/20/minimum-viable-phoe... Phoenix LiveView [0] is really exciting to try out in Elixir. I'd recommend building an auto updating dashboard. I had a micro controller that had various sensors on it that I connected to over a serial port using circuits_uart[1]. I then read the s…

Thanks fellow person. The idea of having a project-based course like Alchemist is just was I was looking for.

if you like coding the happy path, you'll really like elixir!

Re: Elixir v1.10

#93

Post by bglusman »

plainOldText wrote: post #28
happy_path wrote: post #3

Having learnt Ruby and a bit of Erlang, I'm interested in Elixir so I fire this tangential question: How would you recommend to learn Elixir? And a follow-up: some ideas for personal Elixir-based projects?

If you really want to learn Elixir, you should learn enough Erlang prior, to get a better understanding of how Erlang/OTP all fits together. Thus, I would recommend the following structure: 1. Read Joe Armstrong's Book: Programming Erlang to learn the basics and the philosophy behind Erlang from one of its creators. [1] 2. Read Erlang and OTP in Action to learn more about the OTP (Open Telecom Platform), applications…

I'll briefly weigh in with others that you don't need to know Erlang, at least not Erlang syntax, to be effective in Elixir, and the semantics are identical. I think it's useful at some point to learn that all Elixir modules are just Erlang atoms, and to learn about OTP and that using anything built into Erlang is as simple as calling a function on an Atom instead of on an Elixir module. OTP is awesome, and so is Erlang, but I've been doing Elixir professionally for almost 3 years now and I've still never written a line of Erlang (though I did Prolog in college, on which its syntax is based, and I can generally manage to read most code in Erlang, but I've not found the need to often). Even Erlang libraries can be used from Elixir without any special interop, as long as they're published on hex.pm via rebar3. You just add them as a normal dependency in your mix.exs file, and it just works.

Re: Elixir v1.10

#94

Post by the_angry_angel »

histriosum wrote: post #89

I've been tempted a few times to dip my toes into Elixir -- I like the language and the BEAM concepts, but in my environment I always bump into the following concern.. Ecto v3 has been out for more than a year now, and there are still only two supported adapters.. MySQL and Postgres. In my environment, I use a lot of MSSQL and SQLite in addition to Postgres, and those adapters haven't been successfully ported over to…

My personal experience with MSSQL drivers (ORMs and lower level) for many younger, non-Microsoft endorsed, languages is that whilst they will work you will get caught with sharp edges. Until several years down the line and enough people who have the will/time and consolidate their efforts. That said, even MS official endorsed libraries can suddenly disappear (I'm looking at you msnodesql).

Having been down this path, without the time to dedicate fixing/working on a driver, I wouldn't even consider a non-"blessed" language in combination with MSSQL anymore. It was too much pain.

Re: Elixir v1.10

#95

Post by dnautics »

happy_path wrote: post #3

Having learnt Ruby and a bit of Erlang, I'm interested in Elixir so I fire this tangential question: How would you recommend to learn Elixir? And a follow-up: some ideas for personal Elixir-based projects?

if you are a rubyist, I can't more strongly recommend watching this video, which has nothing to do directly with Elixir (in fact it precedes elixir by a couple of years) but if the topics that Bernhart (of wat fame) brings up resonate with you, then you will really like Elixir.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTkzNHF6rMs&t=2252s

Re: Elixir v1.10

#96

Post by dnautics »

alharith wrote: post #30
plainOldText wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you really want to learn Elixir, you should learn enough Erlang prior, to get a better understanding of how Erlang/OTP all fits together. Thus, I would recommend the following structure: 1. Read Joe Armstrong's Book: Programming Erlang to learn the basics and the philosophy behind Erlang from one of its creators. [1] 2. Read Erlang and OTP in Action to learn more about the OTP (Open Telecom Platform), applications…

This makes me not want to learn elixir. Learning one language and becoming masterful at it is hard enough. There's too many "learn this language, but also this other language and platform"'s in my life (JVM-based work, and anything in the front-end JavaScript world it feels like these days). It just feels like you are telling people "Here, learn this language, but also learn the assembly instruction set for your arch…

yeah probably it's not expressed very well. You don't need to learn the syntax of erlang to understand Elixir. You can call any erlang code from within Elixir in a format that almost completely looks like elixir (the difference is that Erlang modules have a colon and start with a lower case and Elixir modules are upper case).

You might need to learn to read erlang documentation. But I've done quite a bit in Elixir, from standing up websites to writing a VM orchestration engine, and the only things I've needed to read the erlang docs for were:

1) writing an Elixir library that wraps the builtin erlang :ssh module with a more elixirish syntax

2) writing an Elixir library that wraps the builtin erlang :gen_statem module with a more elixirish structure and syntax

3) writing an Elixir library that fixes and wraps the builting :tftp module with a more elixirish syntax

4) figuring out how erlang uses SSL so that I could write a two-way encrypted SSL rpc library.

I did them for fun, but all of these are either in prod or used to make production artifacts, and all of these are of course open source and available, so you can use them and not have to do what I did.

Also FWIW, I have read exactly zero of those books.

Re: Elixir v1.10

#97

Post by playing_colours »

bitscrapper wrote: post #58
playing_colours wrote: post #49

A very interesting language on powerful platform with a promising web framework. Many saw it, myself included, as a Ruby / Rails Improved, and expected its quick growth. Unfortunately, initial enthusiasm a few years ago did lead to its wide adoption. I talked with a couple of companies that jumped on it initially, but later decided to move to Java, Kotlin, Go. The main reason was difficulty to hire engineers to scale…

I recently had a convo with a company that moved into Elixir because they had an easier time hiring as they could tap into the local Ruby developers and into folks interested in functional programming (in France). Would you mind saying which country in Europe in particular? Was it also France?

One company in France, the other in Germany.

Re: Elixir v1.10

#98

Post by histriosum »

bglusman wrote: post #91
histriosum wrote: post #89

I've been tempted a few times to dip my toes into Elixir -- I like the language and the BEAM concepts, but in my environment I always bump into the following concern.. Ecto v3 has been out for more than a year now, and there are still only two supported adapters.. MySQL and Postgres. In my environment, I use a lot of MSSQL and SQLite in addition to Postgres, and those adapters haven't been successfully ported over to…

I guess it depends on your needs and motivation... we recently completed the transition from Ecto2 to Ecto3, and while not totally trivial in our case, I think you could do in a way that wasn't hard if you maintained compatibility with both from the start, so that only config had to change. But also, what are your requirements for using SQLite and/or MSSQL? Are you looking at porting existing projects, or new service…

In my case, MSSQL hosts our main business databases which are directly tied to revenue.. If it were being built today, it would probably be on Postgres -- but migrating it any time soon would be prohibitive, and just not profitable.. MSSQL is expensive, but is a darned good database, so there isn't much push to move.

As for SQLite, we use it internally a fair bit for ETL processes, and as a starting point for most of our applications. 90% of the business apps that we end up creating never need anything more than SQLite -- the 10% that do either end up on MSSQL (if they have to tie in to our main databases) or on Postgres (for everything else).

Re: Elixir v1.10

#99

Post by ericsanchez »

elcritch wrote: post #61
playing_colours wrote: post #49

A very interesting language on powerful platform with a promising web framework. Many saw it, myself included, as a Ruby / Rails Improved, and expected its quick growth. Unfortunately, initial enthusiasm a few years ago did lead to its wide adoption. I talked with a couple of companies that jumped on it initially, but later decided to move to Java, Kotlin, Go. The main reason was difficulty to hire engineers to scale…

Weird, on the Elixir forums and slack channels there seems to be a fair number of developers working or wanting to work in Elixir. Perhaps the initial uptake in interest outpaced the developer interests in some areas. It'd be interesting to know what the community is like in Europe. Based on the recent formation of Dashbit [1] and larger companies like PepsiCo (?!) among others openly jumping onboard I think means El…

I picked up _Programming Erlang_ because I like Joe. I'm trying to understand why the platform, and the accompanying language(s), aren't more widely used? People seem to speak very highly about Elixir, BEAM, and OTP. It all seems really great...

I see comments like

This:

>A very interesting language on powerful platform with a promising web framework... I talked with a couple of companies that jumped on it initially, but later decided to move...

And this:

>I recently had a convo with a company that moved into Elixir because they had an easier time hiring...

I see this comment pair somewhat often.

Also,

From @hajile

>BEAM is about an order of magnitude faster than Cpython ...If you prefer Ruby syntax over Python, there is no contest here.

>BEAM is slower than the JVM, but much more stable.

The second quote seems to be a pretty reasonable trade off (my next question is, how much slower?).

This makes a lot more sense to me:

>Functional programming in general seems to be a bit of a self-selector.

I like functional programming, but experiences do tend to be either: "I love FP" or "Eh, not for me."

But are these it? I've been getting into erlang lately (to then get into elixir), but I feel like I've been "waiting for the other shoe to drop." As in, I'm wondering if there's some disadvantage that doesn't get talked about. Are there any engineering blogs that talk about using BEAM/Elixir/et al in production?

Re: Elixir v1.10

#100

Post by fyfy18 »

histriosum wrote: post #89

I've been tempted a few times to dip my toes into Elixir -- I like the language and the BEAM concepts, but in my environment I always bump into the following concern.. Ecto v3 has been out for more than a year now, and there are still only two supported adapters.. MySQL and Postgres. In my environment, I use a lot of MSSQL and SQLite in addition to Postgres, and those adapters haven't been successfully ported over to…

I think this hits on one of my biggest complaints with the Elixir and Erlang ecosystem. As a high level toolkit for building distributed systems it's great, but if you need to do something more low level you are often left on your own using a third party library. This on it's own isn't a big deal, Ruby has the same limitations. Unfortunately the Erlang and Elixir ecosystems aren't as big as Ruby, so that often means the third party libraries aren't so battle tested and features are limited. Often then are written for one company's use case, and don't do anything outside of that.

I run a SaaS product where the backend is Elixir (it's been going for 10 years, so originally written in pure Erlang) and part of it needs to do a lot of http requests. It's a bit of a unusual use case, as I need to do 1000s of requests per minute to different servers. It's not feasible to keep that many connections open, so the connection needs to be recreated each time. Using hackney (the #1 Erlang http client wrapper) I found that some requests often took much longer on average than other requests. I narrowed it down to being a problem somewhere on the client side, but Erlang doesn't provide any tooling for digging deeper into the lifecycle of a HTTP request. I figured maybe it's a problem with TLS and then found Erlang (I think its been improved in v22) had very poor performance when verifying SSL certificates, so I had to disable that. I switched to mint which is a wrapper written in pure Elixir which helped a lot, but still it a left a lot to be desired.

I wrote up a quick test in Go and found doing the same requests, it didn't have any performance issues or timing oddities, and the code was much simpler. I've hbeen working on extracting that part of the system into a Go app, called via gRPC. Unfortunately there is no official gRPC library for Erlang, and the only third party one has limited features that I've had to work around. So it's a bit painful, but don't get me wrong I love using Elixir and Erlang :-)

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