Comment by sotojuan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sotojuan | Hacker News Reader

My favorite part about Elixir is that it doesn't try to reinvent the wheel. It's not an untested, trendy new paradigm or tool. It's based on decades of Erlang/BEAM/OTP experience and Ruby/Rails/last 10~ years of programming ergonomics. The only things that are added are those that actually add to the experience.

An example: A large part of the Erlang standard library is not translated in Elixir. Instead, you call Erlang methods with a seamless interop. José & co. understand that there's no need to reinvent the wheel and no benefit in another abstraction. I like that.

My least favorite part about Elixir is that it has become a "trendy" language among the web crowd. While the community is overall great, there's always a loud minority of "beginner experts" both claiming it's the best thing ever and deriding those for using other tools. I've seen a lot of random, unwarranted Rails bashing and Elixir shilling (never from a team member or community leader though!).

I believe the rails hype was quite warranted. Both the framework as well as ruby were probably the largest leap in their space I've witnessed. When rails first came out, the dominant competitors were Java/spring and all things PHP. The former was an IBM-sponsored attempt to reduce competition using xml-induced suicides. PHP was the land of config.backup.do-not-change-line-endings.php3~.

It's incredible how much dhh got right from the start, and I believe the opinionated nature taught a generation of developers how to structure a project. It's unfortunate that ruby stagnated.

+1! You bring up some excellent points, I think. For example, Elixir is based on decades of Erlang success, and a decade of Ruby and Rails success. I've been using it as the backend to a mobile app for about a year now, and it has far exceeded my expectations in learning curve, ease of writing concurrent code, maintainability, scalability, and performance.

I also agree with you regarding Ruby/Rails. Ruby and Rails are both elegant technologies, and have had a significant influence on how we write web applications today. You cannot take those contributions away, regardless of how many "better" languages come out. I think both Ruby and Elixir have their strengths and weaknesses, but that doesn't mean either is bad. Saying so would be like trashing a screwdriver because it isn't very good at driving nails.

What's wrong with getting excited about a new language and framework that's better? Being vocal about how awesome something is gets people involved which grows the community. A larger community translates to more educational material and tooling.

I think zealotism has a fine line, but I don't think it's all bad. It's almost like protestors that believe in something strongly. Sometimes they cross the line, but them protesting gains visibility which results in change.

Better than what?

Erlang was developed to solve problems that are quite common in Web Development like concurrency, high availability and so on. I see Elixir basically as a user-friendlier version of Erlang with some added goodies. So I think it makes perfect sense for it to be popular among the Web crowd. It definitely has it's own problems(ease of deployment, package maturity, imo). But if your problem involves networks I think Elixir is at the very least worth having a look at.

Deploying Elixir is extremely easy with Distillery, I think.

https://github.com/bitwalker/distillery

I like Elixir and am using it but the large amount of Ruby references is starting to annoy me. I've never used Ruby so all those comparisons add no value for my learning it.

But I do like the language and the environment.

It's actually very much like the situation was with Rails a decade ago. Actually that was more extreme. Anybody remember all those "Rails vs _____" commercials from the Rails Envy people?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7Jte6NvLGU

I started using rails pre 1.0 when in university, inexperienced as I was I totally drank the coolade.

I remember laughing to myself thinking how much more productive I would be than my classmates.

Boy was THAT a rude awakening.

Yes, Rails isn't innocent in this (most web things aren't). Just wanted to give an example.

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