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Comment by throwawaymaths | Hacker News Reader

Learn elixir. The way you program elixir will push you towards better coding. There's a good chance you'll get better at testing, better at writing documentation. If you stick around long enough, you will learn about distributed systems (and their failure and recovery modes) and failure domain management -- this stuff is built into the stdlib

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I was going to say Elixir, thanks for mentioning it.

I'll also add that Haskell, Clojure, and other functional languages will help you think in an entirely new way to program. Python or Ruby are also less mind-expanding, but was a nice change of pace for me at least from my C# day job.

Learning window functions and more advanced bits of SQL that an ORM doesn't give you for free can also be a fun time, along with getting deeper into what indexes can really do.

This is the first I’ve heard a recommendation to learn elixir. I’m definitely interested based on your description + a quick google. Is there anything that comes to mind in terms of what it does different from Go/Rust that makes you recommend it? My understanding was that I’d get these types of benefits from those two languages

Painting with a broad brush... Elixir is like the new ruby where Go is like the new C and Rust is like the new C++.

Elixir shines at concurrency so it will feel more like nodejs and similarly runs on a VM like Node or Java.

Elixir, like Rust, will help with learning functional programming paradigms more than Go.

I disagree here, Elixir looks similar to Ruby from a syntax perspective. But as soon as you dig into OTP it is a completely new world.

It's true that as a beginner you can simply do web development with Phoenix and that feels similar to Rails (Or Django / Laravel / Spring / whatever web framework ). But OTP requires a different way of approaching problems.

I think your comparisons are at the superficial "what does syntax look like" level. If you're thinking culturally, roles, what they're expected to be used for, what hires look like:

Elixir is the new Erlang. Ruby is dead (I used to <3 ruby). Go is the new python, zig is the new c, and rust is the new c++.

I don't think Go or Rust provides anything similar to what you have in Erlang/Elixir. I've done a lot of Ruby and then while learning Haskell and Elm has been a paradigm change with their type systems, Elixir/Erlang felt like a much bigger step in terms of a different required way of approaching problems.

It's not that it's functional (that's completely secondary in Erlang) but its fault tolerance primitives (processes, pids, mailboxes, monitors and links) and the OTP abstractions (GenServers, Supervisors, etc).

You learn to think in terms of distributed systems and think about fault tolerance in a way you cannot in other languages as they don't provide the primitives. It's quite a big leap and it takes time to sink in.

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