Ask HN: What do Erlangers think of Elixir?

32 points·pixiez··5 comments

just out of interest, I know that Elixir is kind of bringing in a lot of 'nice Ruby features' to the language, but how does the Erlang's opinion on this? what is the main reason stopping you moving to Elixir for new project if it is not worse than Erlang? thanks

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It's great. Bringing a lot of people into erlang. Looks pretty nice on its own merits as well. It would need to be significantly nicer to switch over for new projects, and it's not there yet for me personally.

Here are Joe Armstrong's (author of Erlang and early Ericsson engineer) thoughts on Elixir:

http://joearms.github.io/2013/05/31/a-week-with-elixir.html

The feedback is of the kind that a language designer can only get from another language designer. The third rule of language design reminds me of python's GIL. Very insightful. I am curious to know how much of these were actually incorporated into elixir.

it has been 2 years since the feedback was given, so they should have been in the language if the elixir guy agree on what Joe said

It's an awesome project and I like how it significantly lowers the entry barrier to get into Erlang programming for a lot of people. Personally I just haven't really had the time to play around with it yet but it's definitely on my list of things to try.

Also, I don't get that there seems to be such a divide between the Erlang and Elixir community. It should be much more mingled together imho.

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