Elixir – The next big language for the web

As a rails developer primarily, and someone dabbling with Elixir/Phoenix on the side, I get this feeling, too. It's taken the best of rails, dropped the annoying parts (e.g.: weird pluralization stuff, magic connection between instance variables in controllers and views, an explosion of path helpers (Phoenix's approach is basically post_path(:index), post_path(:show, 5), etc.)), and then put it on the rock solid Erlang VM.

I remember hearing the "genesis story" of Elixir. IIRC, José was working on ensuring Rails was thread safe. He did so, but was dismayed with the difficulty and felt like he was fighting Ruby. So he stepped back, and thought that if concurrency is the future, he should find a better language for it. He looked into immutable, functional languages (Haskell, Clojure, Erlang), and realized that Erlang is built for an arguably harder problem: distributed computing, and made the connection that concurrency is sort of a smaller case of that. He worked with Erlang for awhile before deciding that it could be improved by building on it.

Going through the Elixir tutorial and seeing how you could "simulate" state, by spinning up an infinite loop in another process and sending messages to it was mind bending. And learning about Erlang's OTP principles has made me really think about robustness differently. I really do hope Elixir/Phoenix become the next big language and web framework.

I wish I could down vote...

I don't know much about Elixir but it seems like a really interesting language. The space it's trying to fit is definitely something needed: a good, flexible, high level language like Python/Ruby but with strong concurrency support and a functional paradigm.

Can anyone give more information on the nature of Elixir's type system? Without digging into the docs I see elixer-lang says that its dynamically typed, but how strongly typed, is it robust, does it have ADTs, inheritance, etc?

edit: looking an inch deeper, I see that it has 'protocols,' which seem like typeclasses, and 'typespecs,' which seem like gradual typing

For type-safety, you can (optionally) add what are called type specs to your code with are processed with an analyzer tool called dialyzer [1]. This will identify errors related to types, as well as a few other kinds of errors.

This doesn't work with Elixir directly, but rather BEAM byte code (Erlang VM) which Elixir compiles down to.

[1]: http://www.erlang.org/doc/man/dialyzer.html

I think the next big thing is Meteor. Here's why:

1. Real-time baked in.

2. Uses Javascript (tons and tons of developers know at least enough to use Meteor)

3. Sane templating engine.

4. Same wow effect I had when I first started Rails.

5. Fantastic build system.

Pheonix and Elixir may be the bees knees, but unfortunately because it uses a functional language, it drastically cuts down the mindshare of developers. I don't even know any developers in real life that use functional languages. Looks interesting but that's the reality.