An Empathetic Functional Language (opens in new tab)

Author here. You're right. I removed references to "pure" in the article.

What is it formally missing? Just curious

The lack of empathy in your comment is exactly what ends up pushing people (like me) away from functional languages.

Your comment just points what is wrong, without any help to guide those who would like to know more, be them the author or a reader. It is interesting because you just dismissed everything the article was about: being empathetic and providing guidance.

For the curious, I understand a pure functional language one that explicitly marks all side-effects, for example, by using monads. So Elixir indeed does not seem to be a pure language. More information can be found on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purely_functional

What Drew is talking about is the syntax is natural in its representation. Things that we think of as keywords in most languages, ie `def`, `if`, `unless`, `defmodule`, etc are all just macros in Elixir which accept arguments. The syntax is incredibly natural when you see how Elixir is represented internally and built up using macros from a tiny base. This is what Drew is talking about, not some Ruby similarities.

It looks like you skipped all examples given next, which do not seem to be Ruby related at all: the inviting community, the extraordinarily involved creator and the tooling.

Elixir creator here.

As part of my "job", I end-up playing, using and reading a lot about functional programming languages and I like F# a lot. It feels like the team behind F# put a lot of effort in transmitting the concepts in an accessible and clear way (F# Workflow in my opinion are one of such examples). It is not surprise given Microsoft has been introducing functional concepts into languages like C# and VB for a long while.

For Elixir, I have put extra attention into how you to get started with the language because it is not only about learning a functional language (and thinking in terms of recursion, immutability, etc) but also about concurrency and building fault tolerant applications. So help and guidance on every step really matters.

Documentation is extremely important and must be easily accessible. The language should be easy to explore, in your editor or terminal. Error messages should be clear: if you read an error and you don't know what to do next, it is a compiler bug.

I hope I have answered your question. I also would like to say it is not about finding the most empathetic language. They will all have pros and cons, many times even depending on the developer previous experience.

It's close enough that arguing over the definition without explanation isn't useful. For those curious, Elixir's AST is represented by its own datastructures. Based on where you look up the definition, this is or isn't enough to classify as homoiconic, but the point Drew is making is the same. A programmable AST is hugely powerful for metaprogramming.