People have argued that Elixir could replace Python, but tbh, Elixir’s syntax is too ugly to replace something as elegant and simple as Python.
Any high-level language that is afraid of map/reduce and other functional constructs is a waste of time to me.
Python has a lot of mindshare because it looks simple, but by God if it isn't an absolute kitchen sink of a language full of weirdnesses and gotchas. And still, completely afraid of functional constructs.
Nice bait though.
You mean anonymous functions surely? The syntax for closures is basically nothing, you just make a function.
Elixir is afraid of most "functional concepts".
I work in a python shop now, and the code I've written the last years must be the ugliest of my career. If it's too complicated to be solved with a list comprehension, it will be so much uglier than lambdas in a language with a form of piping.
What does that even mean?
That's exactly how lambdas (and all functions) work in actually functional languages like Haskell. And it's a good thing,lambdas shouldn't allow statements.
> how you can't pipe/chain things
Ironically after switching from Elixir to a language where I can have any operator I wish, I found myself using the equivalent of Elixir's |> only on a very rare occasion. IMO they're vastly overrated.
And it doesn't have to be the pipe operator, just something similar. Like list.map().filter().reduce() instead of reduce(filter(map(list))) which quickly gets unwindly.
It can sometimes be annoying yes, but when you come back to the code 6 months later it's mostly a good thing.
Sure there are times that a need for performance calls for mutable data. But for me those times are pretty rare, and when they happen it's usually easy enough to quarantine the mutation.
The big thing in Elixir community right now is to write the native/performance code in Rust[1] and interop with Elixir.
Erlang does not have low-ceremony ways of calling C from Erlang, as I believe Python has. It could be done but that would be frowned upon anyway, because it would defeat the preemptive and fault-tolerant guarantees of the runtime.
So I guess it depends on what you mean by great. FWIW, Elixir has no problems integrating native code from XLA, LibTorch, Polars, that also powers equivalent libraries in Python.
Elegant though...