Hacker News Reader

Elixir has an interesting way of approaching the problem. http://elixir-lang.org/getting-started/meta/macros.html

But this introduces additional ast format. Something in between simplicity of the syntax and complexity of the real ast. In lisp like languages you are working with syntactic forms from the language. Seems like extra overhead without any gain.

I would personally rather optimize for the convenience of reading the language than writing the macro, but I understand the tradeoff.

(And though I came to S-exprs early in my learning, algol-style still is easier for me to parse and read.)

And this is precisely the point of divergence, as "readable" understandably means different things to different people.

Personally I find Clojure very readable, but of course I don't mean that in some kind of objective sense of the word.

Coming from a Clojure background, "extra overhead without any gain" is more or less the definition of Elixir.

Isn't the Erlang VM and ecosystem sort of the selling point of Elixir? Not that I'm particularly well versed in the specific strengths and weaknesses of that platform.

Yes, but you can have that with Erlang as well and I think this is exactly what grandparent was alluding to.

Runtime overhead possibly. Developer productivity is likely increased. Hard to measure that though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com