Hacker News Reader

Comment by plainOldText | Hacker News Reader

I personally find Elixir to be a very readable, expressive and thoughtful language. I agree, Erlang not so much.

Would you care to elaborate which parts you consider to be "gobbledegook"? The code supplied is just a few lines of code.

I don't know how familiar are you with the language, but the magical aspect of it will quickly disappear once your learn a few OTP patterns.

I personally started initially with Erlang, but when I discovered Elixir, I switched, as I found it way more pleasurable.

Python and Elixir are actually the only two languages that make me happy when writing code, and I've tried quite a few of them, from C all the way to Haskell.

View on HN

> I agree, Erlang not so much.

I thought the same thing once, until I actually sat down and tried to learn Erlang. It turns out that a lot of the decisions that I originally thought were asinine, actually make a lot of sense.

Line terminators for example (, ; .) tend to receive a lot of flak, but they really aren't as crazy as they first seem. Commas come after normal lines of code (you can read them as and), semicolons come at the end of clauses in if or case statements (and you can read them as or), and periods mark the end of a function. It's a little more verbose than something like Javascript or Ruby, but it really isn't as confusing as critics tend to claim!

Oh, absolutely. I'm sure the Erlang inventors weren't crazy, and most of their choices have some reasoning behind them. But I personally find Erlang more difficult to read than other languages.

The things that have always tripped me up for Erlang are capitalized variables, lowercase modules, and bare word atoms. There certainly isn't anything wrong with those choices, but it is counter to everything I'm used to from other languages that it presents some cognitive overhead.

In the end, even as somebody who cares about the look of code a lot, it doesn't matter to me. The BEAM and OTP are elegant enough to compensate for any syntax.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com