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0 pointsipnon1y ago0 comments

I have this same feeling using Elixir, and I think it’s because it’s excellent at showing you exactly where you have undefined behavior in your application, much in the same way you spend most of your time writing Rust by wrangling with the compiler that keeps showing you all the holes in your logic. You can write a seemingly equivalent program in Python, and it runs just fine because it’s interpreted, so it seems like you hit the bullseye first try. But as we’re all aware, there are still countless bugs in your system, they just don’t surface until later when it’s Friday night and your website finally went viral. It’s the downside of the “fail fast, fail often” OTP paradigm: you develop the program by working through your faulty logic step by step as determined by the (many) errors raised by the BEAM. The upside being that unlike Python none of these errors are usually strong enough to be fatal to your application.

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steve_adams_861y ago· 1 in thread

This is a huge part of it, for sure.

I think this is why people often dislike state machines too, for example. They force you to really think through what you're trying to do, and there are no shortcuts.

The irony is that the state machine pattern itself kind of is a shortcut to stable, reliable, safe code. People find them overly complex and full of ceremony, but it's like... Do you really want to try getting the same assurances from your code without this kind of abstraction? I'd rather know my I can't shoot myself in the foot, because I guarantee you that I will.

Elixir also has the added layer of unfamiliarity for a lot of people (myself included) where you might intuitively know how to do something imperatively, but you need to do it within the FP paradigm. I like FP and have adopted a lot of its patterns all over the place, but I still find I'm not a great FP thinker in general. After something like 10 years. My FP-fu is limited to relatively basic operations, and when I go into advanced territory I'm constantly leaning on reference material. That's more so a skill issue than an Elixir issue.

throwawaymaths1y ago

For the most part you really only need to know Enum.map, Enum.reduce and if you really hate recursion, Enum.reduce_while

And the nice thing is that those are highly imperative/declarative functionals.

Edit: ok, also "returning stuff out of if and case statements". That one kept triggering a python developer I had, had to remind him something like 20 times. Elixir would be way better if it had 'no shadowing variables' rules.

michalbcz1y ago

> The upside being that unlike Python none of these errors are usually strong enough to be fatal to your application.

That's a great point. Each language has its domain where it excels. The reality is that 90% (or more) of all apps don't deal with the traffic scale of YouTube, the complexity of an operating system, or the mission-critical constraints of software for the F-35. For most businesses, Python is more than sufficient in 2024. At the same time, for learners, it's much easier to pick up. It's a sweet spot.

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