undefined | Better HN

0 pointsjmcgough8y ago0 comments

It became open source in the 90s. It's been used by several high-traffic sites/apps to support chat clients (Riot Games, WhatsApp, and I think Fetlife), but outside of that has seen very little adoption.

I think it's a lot harder to sell people on a language that looks syntactically unintelligible to a lot of web developers. Most people I know working with Elixir now are/were Rubyists, so it's easy for them to make the leap from that and start to understand all of the awesome things they get from BEAM and OTP.

0 comments

4 comments · 1 top-level

jhgg8y ago· 3 in thread

Elixir/Erlang is great, but in addition to knowing the language, there is a huge library of tools within OTP/ERTS that you need to understand to effectively use it and skills learned from other languages don't map too well to Erlang/Elixir as they would to other languages (like going from Python to Go for example). In addition to learning OTP, you also have to learn how a functional language works if you're not familiar. A lot of things to learn to adopt Elixir/Erlang, but it's well worth it! I just don't think there's much reason for people to make that leap as there are much more familiar languages that can be used to solve the problems most developers are trying to solve.

quaunaut8y ago

I mean, personally I'm using Elixir more for the language itself than OTP. I have a basic knowledge of OTP now after using the language for 2 years, but FP was my main reason for coming and staying, which for me has been the real fun of it.

Then again, FP for me was not difficult at all, and actually made several of the issues I had with my Ruby code not being expressive/obvious enough, or difficulty in composition, disappear overnight.

pmarreck8y ago

> and actually made several of the issues I had with my Ruby code not being expressive/obvious enough, or difficulty in composition, disappear overnight.

I've noticed that pattern-matching and guards just completely eliminate a stupid* amount of boilerplate logic in Ruby code

* "stupid" in hindsight, of course

jmcgoughOP8y ago

I fell in love with the language, which is why I kept using it to begin with - working in a functional language is great, and it's very readable and powerful (pattern matching <3).

With that said, I could write basically anything Elixir gives me with Ruby. The real value I get from elixir is the blazingly fast performance of BEAM and the speed at which I can build complex and stable distributed systems with OTP.

1 more reply

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse