Elixir as an Object-Oriented Language

That said, I think the real value of Erlang is the actor model, and specifically, the way it causes you to model things and concepts (or objects, but without the baggage) as isolated processes. This is a direct parallel to the kingdoms of verbs and nouns, but, many OO languages provide isolation for their objects/things/nouns, but not for the processes/verbs. Or rather, the process is not naturally related to the noun, but rather almost an Aspect Oriented programming approach. The actual execution crosses the boundaries of the objects/things/nouns (i.e., a single object's instance being accessed by multiple threads, all contending to modify it; the verbs span the boundary of the noun). But in the actor model, that doesn't happen; you have proper isolation of state (the thing/noun/etc) in the actor, but also isolation of execution (the process/verb) in the actor. That is, one actor = one isolated chunk of both state AND execution.

It's this model that people are looking at when they say it's better at object orientation. I think that's a bit misleading (per other comments), but there's real benefit to it.

Not every abstraction is object-orientation. The notion of not caring about the internals of something (as with the article's mention that "This is possible because Elixir doesn’t care how the process works internally") is something that goes deeper conceptually and further back in time than objects as we know them.

It might be neat for weaning someone off an overwhelmingly OOP mindset, but that's not what it seems to be trying to do. Instead, it's just demonstrating how to use a new language without it forcing you to think differently, and that's worrying. If every language is a fantastic object-oriented language, why bother using any given one?

Also this fits with my experience with Elixir. I can apply all my OOP baggage very well in Elixir; one active process maps beautifully one object.

The only thing I miss is a clear _terminology_ distinction between the Elixir versions of an object and a class. Both are called processes, which is a bit messy. Strictly a process is just the runtime thing (the "object") and the "class" is just a function (or, in practice, a module that follows a certain convention). But I've heard many people refer to the latter as "processes" too and I'd love a better word.

Kay's thoughts on the matter are in the link below.

http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/46592/so-what...

I made up the term 'object-oriented', and I can tell you I didn't have C++ in mind

-- Alan Kay, OOPSLA '97

If you are going to Change it At least change it to "Elixir - The Most Object-Oriented Language"

Otherwise a good read. The idea of Elixir/Erlang being "object-oriented" by way of their application of the actor model was one of the "eureka" moments in my transition from procedural languages (in particular, Ruby).

"When I was first introduced to the idea of OOP I was skeptical but didn't know why - it just felt "wrong". After its introduction OOP became very popular (I will explain why later) and criticising OOP was rather like "swearing in church". OOness became something that every respectable language just had to have.

As Erlang became popular we were often asked "Is Erlang OO" - well, of course the true answer was "No of course not" - but we didn't to say this out loud - so we invented a serious of ingenious ways of answering the question that were designed to give the impression that Erlang was (sort of) OO (If you waved your hands a lot) but not really (If you listened to what we actually said, and read the small print carefully)."

http://web.archive.org/web/20020413132000/http://www.bluetai...