Comment by eggy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eggy | Hacker News Reader

Great news! I wanted to learn BEAM/OTP, but had tried Erlang briefly years ago, and then went back to Common Lisp. Now I can try to learn BEAM/OTP in a syntax that is more appealing to me than Elixir's Ruby-like syntax. I like Elixir, and it is very popular, but true runtime macros are available in LFE 1.0. In addition, Robert Virding was one of the co-creators of Erlang, so his devotion to bringing the best Lisp he could to the BEAM platform within its confines, comes with some authority. The Google Group Lisp Flavoured Erlang is a very responsive community and resource for getting started. Congratulations LFE on your v1.0! OT, but I also use Extempore - the music, graphics livecoding environment with a great language, xtlang that I believe was based upon S7 scheme and has an LLVM backend [1]. There are some s-expression to WebAssembly projects floating around too. All around good news for all the choices to work with up front no matter your preferences.

   [1]  http://extempore.moso.com.au/

Elixir is really not similar to Ruby and the comparison wears thin. This is my opinion after having used Elixir daily for the last 1.5 years and Ruby for 10 years before that.

Elixir really is a brilliant language and José et al have made the developer experience second to none with hex, mix, the language guide and docs. Compare how you bring up a repl: Elixir, type iex; LFE, cd into LFE dir, type ./bin/lfe. (EDIT: this is incorrect, see child) Trivial example and something easily fixed if it bothers you, but it's emblematic of the attention to detail that has gone into devx. I am deeply in love with Elixir. That Robert co-authored Erlang should not mean giving Elixir any less consideration IMO.

That said I sincerely wish to congratulate Robert on this 1.0, I look forward to using LFE in anger for something very soon now it is 1.0 (and it will be easy to slip in an LFE module into one of my OTP apps). Exciting times for the Erlang ecosystem.

> Compare how you bring up a repl: Elixir, type iex; LFE, cd into LFE dir, type ./bin/lfe.

Is that a joke?

> If you have installed LFE, then you may start the REPL from any location:

     $ lfe

what you quoted is if you're running LFE straight from the git clone[0], and noted so.

[0] because you may not want a system-wide LFE and LFE is being a nice citizen in explicitly supporting that use case.

Sadly not a joke, just me not reading properly (scanning over on my phone but no excuse!). Thanks for correcting me, I deserve the down votes for that. I fully retract and make no claims as to the devx of LFE. My feelings on Elixir remain unchanged :)

In actual fact, the LFE installation experience was a breath of fresh air:

    $ brew install erlang
    $ git clone ...lfe.git
    $ cd lfe; make && make install

    $ lfe

I miss make.

FWIW that can be further simplified to just `brew install lfe`: https://lfe.gitbooks.io/quick-start/content/1.html#1-2-1-hom...

Not only that, but an hour after your post, someone (burma-shave) had updated the LFE formula for v1.0 of LFE: * https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew/blob/f95c192d43d9a56bda...

I didn't exactly write it that way; I specifically referred to syntax. I am aware of the good things in Elixir, since I started playing with it years ago. I gave up trying to figure out why something in life becomes more popular than another, and just go with what I judge is best for me, makes me happy and gets the job done. Pony seems to be chomping on the heels of Erlang/Elixir/LFE, but I will stay with LFE for now. Jose and team have done a great job putting together a great ecosystem. I just happen to prefer Lisp syntax over blocks with 'END's. It is purely subjective. I know many languages to a certain degree (J, Python, C, Scheme, some Prolog, APL), and I try and pick the one that is best for the job. I just find myself comfortable in Lisp or Scheme. I am trying to grok Idris and Haskell this year, but I am really into livecoding, and so I chose Extempore. Sonic Pi is great, and is based on Ruby. Again, just personal preference. I am just excited about LFE for my selfish reasons ;)

I think the JVM can use some good competition and BEAM is ideally geared towards the next generation of immutable/functional/concurrent languages

WRT to macros how does LFE differ from Elixir? My understanding was that Elixir macros were incredibly powerful(hence most of the language constructs being built in them).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com