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Comment by fortran77 | Hacker News Reader

It's a shame that the elegance of Erlang has been distorted with Elixir.

Notably not the impression Joe Armstrong, creator of Erlang, had when he tried Elixir out for a week:

> This is good shit. The funny thing is that Erlang and Elixir are the same thing under the surface. They “feel” the same to me.

https://joearms.github.io/published/2013-05-31-a-week-with-e...

It’s a shame this thread has to be spoiled by off-topic criticism of another language. Why even bring it up? You can promote Erlang without tearing down Elixir.

I don't particularly care for Elixir, but it's kind of nice having more people on the BEAM.

I don't think the above comment is put in the best way...

But I do have a certain duality about my feelings on Elixir

On one hand, yes, it is cool to see more adoption of BEAM, I do wish Erlang could have done that by itself.

I vastly prefer Erlang to Elixir and find it does slightly... taint the simplicity and cleanliness of the syntax Erlang made made me fall in love with, just to be Ruby-like.

I don't feel it actually benefits the language at all past the meta reason of attracting Ruby-ists (which again, isn't necessarily a bad thing by itself)

It's interesting that you would say a language could 'taint the simplicity and cleanliness of the syntax' of another language. You can still work purely in Erlang and not deal with Elixir can you not?

I'll say my own personal experience is that I knew of Erlang but had never really looked into it or knew of the benefits of OTP and BEAM. Being a Rubyist, Elixir bridged that gap for me and I've been reading more and trying to learn more about this new (to me) environment.

I would also say that Elixir has benefited Erlang because José hasn't just built Elixir, but has gone and helped implement new things into Erlang; the entire environment is benefiting from drawing in new engineers.

My problem with Elixir is kind of similar to C/C++. Interfacing with C code from C++ is easy, interfacing with C++ code from C isn't easy and you end up with loads of ugly wrapper code. The same goes for Erlang and Elixir, interfacing with Erlang code from Elixir is easy, interfacing with Elixir code from Erlang is ugly. And the more people start writing code in Elixir I fear that more people are turning away from Erlang. And even if the entire environment in total benefits from more people using Elixir, that environment will more and more turn into an almost pure Elixir environment with very little of Erlang left.

It's interesting how your comment seems to be trying to refute parts of mine... yet says nothing contrary to what I've said, and in fact repeats a lot of it, but in different words

I mean, I didn't imply you can't work in Erlang, and I already stated drawing Ruby-ists isn't a bad thing... so I guess I don't get why anything but the middle paragraph was needed here.

The advantage isn’t Ruby syntax - it’s the macro system.

Macros are the perfect example of things that go against the core of why I love Erlang.

Erlang actively makes it hard to write hard to maintain systems because it's syntax is so lean, there's no way to make your FactoryFactoryBeanFactory

Macros can easily be abused, and to me the biggest gain I've seen is removing OTP boilerplate, which is not that much compared to what you get out of it

I will say I haven't used Elixir in anger so I don't know if people are doing more with it now, but I'd just rather not have it.

I feel the same way. Elixir users keep banging on the macro drum but most Erlangers don't want them.

I can read any Erlang program I wrote 10 years ago with ease. I have difficulty understanding a small Elixir project I wrote just a few months ago.

This is subjective. I never wrote a macro in Elixir after two years of being paid to work with it. I remember I studied Erlang in 2010 and I was like "great concepts but the syntax is horrible, no wonder it's very niche." I never wrote anything with Erlang but I can read it. I looked at Elixir when it was at one of its early versions and I could immediately work with it. I wrote some code and eventually got a customer.

This could be affected by my background. My trajectory is 99% in the imperative set of languages. BASIC in the 80s, a little COBOL and Pascal, a lot of C and Perl, some Visual Basic, a few PHP, a little eLisp, some Java, a lot of JavaScript for the web but mostly Perl until I picked up Ruby on Rails in the middle 2000s. Some Node and some Python until I got a customer with Django. I'm mostly work with Elixir, Python, Ruby and some React now.

I script in Ruby for myself. The Python ecosystemis for the web looks complicated by design (but simple compared to Java), Elixir is OK for large projects, too cumbersome for small ones.

I sincerely dislike the syntax of GenServers (this would need a blog post) and Ecto is unnecessarily complex and a productivity sink. But the Elixir and Erlang way to pattern matching is heaven.

Almost no one writes macros in the elixir ecosystem though, only the biggest players (phoenix, ecto, exunit).

I have no problem reading my elixir code from a year ago. The erlang otp tftp module, by contrast, is indecipherable, with three layers of module indirection I had to fight against (there was a fatal bug with a misspelled atom that I couldn't trace the code path to). In the end, I just wrote my own tftp.

Exactly right. I can easily read my Erlang code years later. The syntax is so simple I can teach it to someone in a day.

Erlang has macros though? Did elixir add something to it?

That's funny because I think that the syntax of elixir is simpler than that of erlang. Records, for example, are rather atrocious, and meaningful line terminators makes code slightly harder to read, and reuse and refactoring... Annoying. And then there's header files...

I feel the same way - Erlang looks like someone mashed their face over their keyboard, whereas Elixir looks simple and readable.

What’s been distorted?

"The language should be simple – Simple in the sense that there should be a small number of basic principles, if these are right then the language will be powerful but easy to comprehend and use. Small is good."

Elixir has Erlang semantics + hygienic macros and a few other niceties. Judicious use of macros in libraries can actually make the experience simpler for the developers.

If both languages have the same semantics, why choose the one with more complex syntax?

Syntax complexity is highly debatable topic. It involves complexity of parsing (by machine), reading and scanning(by human), conciseness, coherence of syntactic constructs and more things I don’t know. I wouldn’t say prolog based syntax is necessarily simpler than ruby(?) based one in all those categories.

Of course only LISPs have achieved syntax perfection, all hail LFE and other lispy fronts to erlang!

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