Why Elixir (2014)
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Why Elixir (2014)
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Re: Why Elixir (2014)
#2From the author of this post, here's one of the best demos of Elixir, Erlang and modern distributed computing in general:
"The Soul of Erlang and Elixir • Saša Jurić • GOTO 2019" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvBT4XBdoUE
When you feel sufficiently amazed by this demo, I also recommend the Elixir in Action book, by this same author, to get started with this incredible ecosystem and paradigm.
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It's hard to imagine a better platform than Erlang's for writing distributed and networked systems of any kind. I fell in love with Elixir in 2016 and have been using it full time since, first adopting as CTO in my previous company, now powering my new solo business. It's such a good language, with great community and stewardship, running on a rock solid platform that's so advanced compared to most popular languages today.
Erlang was created 38 years ago, and it's good to see the ideas of Armstrong, Virding and Williams to be vindicated today. They simply were too far ahead of their time.
Re: Why Elixir (2014)
#3From the author of this post, here's one of the best demos of Elixir, Erlang and modern distributed computing in general: "The Soul of Erlang and Elixir • Saša Jurić • GOTO 2019" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvBT4XBdoUE When you feel sufficiently amazed by this demo, I also recommend the Elixir in Action book, by this same author, to get started with this incredible ecosystem and paradigm. --- It's hard to imagi…
Soul of erlang got me hooked to Elixir recently, trying to get my hands dirty as well.
Other than distributed/concurrent system use-cases, could you share what kind of products are best when built with elixir/erlang compared to easier to write languages like Go, for example.
Re: Why Elixir (2014)
#4From the author of this post, here's one of the best demos of Elixir, Erlang and modern distributed computing in general: "The Soul of Erlang and Elixir • Saša Jurić • GOTO 2019" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvBT4XBdoUE When you feel sufficiently amazed by this demo, I also recommend the Elixir in Action book, by this same author, to get started with this incredible ecosystem and paradigm. --- It's hard to imagi…
Soul of erlang got me hooked to Elixir recently, trying to get my hands dirty as well. Other than distributed/concurrent system use-cases, could you share what kind of products are best when built with elixir/erlang compared to easier to write languages like Go, for example.
Anything that spends most of its time waiting on IO, and doesn't do a great deal of number crunching: i.e. any kind of server talking over a network socket.
Go, and any other language, lowers the barrier to running concurrent code, but there is much more to concurrent servers than concurrency: fault tolerance, isolation, shared state management, instrumentation, introspection, clustering, process migration. The BEAM and its ecosystem gives you all of that out of the box.
Also, the BEAM offers an immutable, functional environment. Data races are impossible, which are the biggest pain and source of heisenbugs in any kind of system with > 1 concurrent thread. This is huge. You can model your entire system as concurrent processes without ever having to deal with concurrency issues. You only ever have to think in "single-threaded" mode.
Re: Why Elixir (2014)
#5Earlier quoted context omitted.
Soul of erlang got me hooked to Elixir recently, trying to get my hands dirty as well. Other than distributed/concurrent system use-cases, could you share what kind of products are best when built with elixir/erlang compared to easier to write languages like Go, for example.
Anything that spends most of its time waiting on IO, and doesn't do a great deal of number crunching: i.e. any kind of server talking over a network socket. Go, and any other language, lowers the barrier to running concurrent code, but there is much more to concurrent servers than concurrency: fault tolerance, isolation, shared state management, instrumentation, introspection, clustering, process migration. The BEAM…
What language and programming style did you use prior to using Elixir the most? Have you been able to build systems of similar or even larger size as previous projects in other languages, and what was that experience like (i.e. how did Elixir make things better)?
Re: Why Elixir (2014)
#6Earlier quoted context omitted.
Anything that spends most of its time waiting on IO, and doesn't do a great deal of number crunching: i.e. any kind of server talking over a network socket. Go, and any other language, lowers the barrier to running concurrent code, but there is much more to concurrent servers than concurrency: fault tolerance, isolation, shared state management, instrumentation, introspection, clustering, process migration. The BEAM…
What language and programming style did you use prior to using Elixir the most? Have you been able to build systems of similar or even larger size as previous projects in other languages, and what was that experience like (i.e. how did Elixir make things better)?
I've been doing this job for 20 years. I am fluent in C, Go, Rust, Python, as well as Elixir, and for my clients I have written concurrent systems running in production in all of these languages. I know how painful and complex the problem space is.
My opinion is not that rare, so instead of listing my credentials, you can search and find many others that have found this platform to be a great fit, simply because it has been designed to solve this very problem since 1986 when everybody else was focusing on single core, isolated systems.
Re: Why Elixir (2014)
#7From the author of this post, here's one of the best demos of Elixir, Erlang and modern distributed computing in general: "The Soul of Erlang and Elixir • Saša Jurić • GOTO 2019" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvBT4XBdoUE When you feel sufficiently amazed by this demo, I also recommend the Elixir in Action book, by this same author, to get started with this incredible ecosystem and paradigm. --- It's hard to imagi…
Soul of erlang got me hooked to Elixir recently, trying to get my hands dirty as well. Other than distributed/concurrent system use-cases, could you share what kind of products are best when built with elixir/erlang compared to easier to write languages like Go, for example.
Not sure how the 'best products' constraint is supposed to be interpreted, but Elixir is a more flexible tool for developers than Golang. It has a decent REPL, can be used for scripting, and so on.
I haven't used Golang for things like binary protocols so I can't really compare, but Elixir or Erlang would be a good fit since they're very good for expressing grammars and fundamentally treat strings as byte sequences.
If pattern matching helps you express your problem domain succinctly they're also a good fit. Same goes for macros. My impression is that Golang commonly requires quite verbose or complex code compared to Elixir.
I expect raw number crunching performance to be better in Golang, but BEAM processes are very lightweight so it might win on either performance or developer ergonomics if the task can be solved in parallel.
Re: Why Elixir (2014)
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
Soul of erlang got me hooked to Elixir recently, trying to get my hands dirty as well. Other than distributed/concurrent system use-cases, could you share what kind of products are best when built with elixir/erlang compared to easier to write languages like Go, for example.
Anything that spends most of its time waiting on IO, and doesn't do a great deal of number crunching: i.e. any kind of server talking over a network socket. Go, and any other language, lowers the barrier to running concurrent code, but there is much more to concurrent servers than concurrency: fault tolerance, isolation, shared state management, instrumentation, introspection, clustering, process migration. The BEAM…
> Data races are impossible
As far as the application code goes, but most systems have databases which opens you up to all kinds of race conditions. Does Elixir help in that case?
Re: Why Elixir (2014)
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
What language and programming style did you use prior to using Elixir the most? Have you been able to build systems of similar or even larger size as previous projects in other languages, and what was that experience like (i.e. how did Elixir make things better)?
I've been doing this job for 20 years. I am fluent in C, Go, Rust, Python, as well as Elixir, and for my clients I have written concurrent systems running in production in all of these languages. I know how painful and complex the problem space is. My opinion is not that rare, so instead of listing my credentials, you can search and find many others that have found this platform to be a great fit, simply because it h…
Sounds good, you make it sound like that Elixir is now your de-facto, even for non-distributed systems projects?
Re: Why Elixir (2014)
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been doing this job for 20 years. I am fluent in C, Go, Rust, Python, as well as Elixir, and for my clients I have written concurrent systems running in production in all of these languages. I know how painful and complex the problem space is. My opinion is not that rare, so instead of listing my credentials, you can search and find many others that have found this platform to be a great fit, simply because it h…
Sounds good, you make it sound like that Elixir is now your de-facto, even for non-distributed systems projects?
Servers are 99% of the code I write, so yes I choose Elixir, though for very conservative clients and small projects I use Go.
For everything else, which is not a lot, there's Rust, Scheme, Lisp and many other fun languages to explore. My focus these days is on my business rather than consulting, so I have a lot of freedom.