My main question coming out of it: if you are going to go with a dynamic language, why go with Elixir over Python or Ruby (or Clojure or Racket or ...)? These have a larger mind-share and a more broadly recognized syntax.
Granted, Erlang (BEAM?) processes are appealing.
If you are using Erlang or Elixir, why?
* Concurrency is not an after thought. The primary abstraction are actors (Erlang processes) that are isolated and communicate with message passing. Data structures are also immutable which helps greatly with concurrency and also leads to clearer code (it is really comforting to know that a value won't change under your feet).
* The Erlang VM: we are leveraging 30 years of knowledge in building and running fault-tolerant systems, thanks to the underlying process model. We could really go deep into this topic so I will just link to an article I wrote some time ago talking about Elixir and microservices: http://blog.plataformatec.com.br/2015/06/elixir-in-times-of-...
* Performance may also be a big deal depending on what you are doing. Elixir/Erlang are not good at number crunching but if you are running anything behind TCP/UDP, it will give you better throughput and a consistent latency compared to Ruby, Python, Node.JS, etc.
* We don't have compile time checking but we do provide type specifications and a way to check them: http://elixir-lang.org/docs/master/elixir/Kernel.Typespec.ht.... The integration between Elixir and Dialyzer is suboptimal today but if type checking is a big deal for you, it will certainly help.
TL;DR: Elixir is for building and running fault-tolerant, concurrent, distributed systems. It brings extensibility and great tooling to the Erlang VM. If what you are building requires 1. a TCP/UDP port and/or 2. running for a long time, you should definitely consider Elixir. An introduction to the language can be seen here: https://vimeo.com/131631884
That said, if I were looking into a BEAM language in the future - and after this thread I am inspired to try again - I would probably be more inclined to go with Erlang. For the same reason that Java is probably an easier sell than Scala.
However, I am most likely not your target audience. I am neither an existing Erlang user nor a Ruby user (nor even a Node user).
I would choose Elixir over Ruby or Python if my service needed to high reliability or if it touched the network in any significant way. Ruby and Python suck at concurrency and are "fragile" when serving lots of connections. Clojure or Scala (seriously, no one is building a product in Racket...) would be appealing but the JVM brings its own set of headaches and even with bolt-on large-scale concurrency support the JVM languages are not significantly better at these problems.
Broadly recognized syntax? Elixir is much easier for people to read than either Clojure or Scala and is close enough to Ruby that Elixir is drawing over a lot of developers from that group.
I use Elixir because it is fun, it scales well and has high performance for the problems I am throwing at it, and it helps me develop solid and reliable solutions.
I'm not sure what my point is - it's just not an easy sell?
Personal, subjective conclusion: Scala is substantially more complicated to use and learn than Elixir (to achieve the same ends).
Personal, subjective remark: Scala is substantially more complicated than Haskell. It's just so big.
If you know Elixir and are confident using it, you'll understand its benefits and when best to use it. I work for a dev shop where we use Elixir for client work. Elixir is performant and you end up making the most out of your server resources. That would be great for clients who end up having huge traffic. But more important than performance, I find it easier to maintain Elixir code largely because it's a functional language. Lastly, I think Elixir's Lisp-inspired macros are a great way to write reusable libraries/modules.
In essence, I'm more productive with Elixir than I am with Ruby even though I used Ruby for much longer. I find it a more pleasant experience maintaining Elixir code than Ruby code.
Try Jane Street's Core. I hear it's a better situation.
> "highly-performant"
On one core. Erlang and Elixir will blow it away when employing more cores, naturally.
Though OCaml would probably perform similarly or better (for certain CPU-bound tasks) when running N processes to N cores. You'll need to bring your own IPC mechanism - this is probably the key BEAM value add.
> syntax and alternative MO are still a big sell > web engineering > it's just not an easy sell?
You sell based on productivity, performance, and correctness:
"By using this technology, you will have less bugs, which is cheaper and more productive in the long-term."
Granted, this is a very hard thing to prove, it has anecdotally been my experience with ML-derivatives.
Whole "classes" indeed.
Especially for Ruby devs who are fed up dealing with concurrency and performance problems in Rails, Elixir is very attractive and will make you code in a different way.
Clojure allows some OO if you'd like. I see that as a drawback, personally, but I've drank the functional koolaid.
If your problem is one for which a fault tolerant, highly-scalable system with actor-model concurrency is an appropriate solution, Elixir (or Erlang) makes a good choice, and Ruby/Python/Clojure aren't particularly great choices for that. That they all happen to lack static type checking is not what is motivating the choice.
Also, Erlang/Elixir have fairly robust (for languages that are "natively" dynamic) type-checking available through dialyzer, which can be strength compared to other dynamic languages.
If you ever try to do anything as interesting with types as you could in a dynamic language, you'd immediately start transporting interface{}s (essentially void*) all over the place and lose all static typing [0] (and context[1]).
[0] - https://github.com/eatonphil/gimpy/blob/master/net/http/http...
You should check out Dialyzer.
I'm trying to convince people at work to use Elixir but people seem to have language fatigue. The lack of a major company/product using Elixir is making me worried as well. But hey .. someone had to be first, right? :)
Anyone here who hasn't yet been burned by social proof, please raise their hands.
There are plenty of people using Erlang. That's good enough, IMO.
If there were ever a show-stopping problem with the Elixir compiler that couldn't (or wouldn't) be fixed, you could just write whatever functionality you needed in Erlang (Which decades of prior art exist for).
https://pragprog.com/book/elixir/programming-elixir
This is a very nice book that introduces functional programming in a way that's very accessible to people coming from Python or Ruby. Elixir is probably more accessible than, say, Haskell or Scala for someone coming from one of those languages.
Have not coded Elixir in anger, but from the look of it the immutability and composability and other benefits of debugging functional programs could be a big win over writing the same program in Ruby or Python.