Hacker News Reader

Comment by JohnHaugeland | Hacker News Reader

Elixir is to Erlang what Coffeescript is to Javascript: one guy who wanted a real language to feel like Ruby instead, and started with string interpolation and never stopped

View on HN

You are being outright negative about Elixir throughout the entire thread, generally without providing good reasons why outside what seems to be your personal bias. No one is forcing you to drop Erlang for Elixir

Actually, I'd argue that Elixir is to Erlang, as C++ is to C. Before I'd found Elixir, I had never touched Ruby, but had written some Erlang.

Joe Armstrong himself was quoted as saying Elixir was some "good shit" (may he rest in peace. Super smart and super funny is a rare combination).

c++ was not created for the specific purpose of making a language feel like ruby

c++ added extensive new tools that the base language did not have

c++ did not get its engineering team hired off to work on something unrelated

c++ did not create problems by misunderstanding c designs and trying to change them

in these four ways, elixir and coffeescript are alike

> Joe Armstrong himself was quoted as saying Elixir was some "good shit"

Yeah, Joe also said that object orientation was a terrible mistake, and if you read his design principles, Elixir was swimming upstream of most of them

When Joe got asked about this, his answer was simple: "I just like to support other peoples' programming languages. You can tell my personal preferences by what languages I use."

> may he rest in peace.

I also miss Joe :(

> c++ was not created for the specific purpose of making a language feel like ruby

> Yeah, Joe also said that object orientation was a terrible mistake, and if you read his design principles, Elixir was swimming upstream of most of them

Did you, by any chance, use Elixir in 2011 and never really re-approached it?

Back in 2011, Elixir was an attempt to bring Ruby and object-orientation to the Erlang VM. It had a prototype-based model, it had eval-based meta-programming, it had loops, and, as you may guess, it failed pretty spectacularly.

But at the end of 2011 and beginning of 2012, I started from scratch. Object-orientation has been removed, a Lisp-based meta-programming model was introduced, most Ruby influences were removed except for minor syntax constructs.

Saying that the design principles were "swimming upstream" of OO principles are inaccurate since 2012 - as most of your other comments in this thread. Our main additions at the language level, compared to Erlang, are macros and protocols, where one is Lisp-based and the other is taken after Clojure/Haskell. From 2012, putting the Erlang VM front and center has literally been one of our main design goals.

Suggesting that Elixir has done little to improve on what Erlang offers seems very untrue. If you write as much Erlang as you claim to, the fixes to string/binary handling and structs/records alone, represent a huge productivity gain.

But everyone's entitled to their own opinion. I occasionally read opinions from polyglots who prefer Erlang's syntax to many other languages. But I personally much prefer Elixir's syntax to Erlang's. For one, the issues in dealing with strings and binaries as mentioned above, for another, I find the punctuation rules in Erlang to be a complete PITA ("." and ",", anyone?).

I suppose it's all opinion, but the points you make about Elixir, when it really is very similar to Erlang 'semantically' (not syntactically), are interesting for how at odds they seem with any of the expert Erlang and Elixir developers I've spoken to, or any of the better researched opinions I've read.

Which is why I find your posts interesting, if not a little misguided.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com