Hacker News Reader

Comment by MarkMarine | Hacker News Reader

This hits the mark for me, good type system, backed by Erlang and BEAM, access to Phoenix live view, but doesn’t have (imho Terrible) ruby syntax

View on HN

As someone who loves ruby syntax, I'd be very interested to hear which parts of it you don't like.

I haven’t used Elixir but I used Ruby as my main programming language for a few years and my biggest complaint with Ruby syntax is decision fatigue. There’s almost never a single clear and obvious way to do something. Overall I find Ruby syntax to prioritize cutesy aesthetics over practicality.

If you use Elixir for a while you may find that there is a lot more consistency, and almost no ‘cutesy’ code around. Elixir’s syntax only looks a little like Ruby at first glance.

Yeah, as a seasoned Ruby dev I found the "similarities" between Elixir and Ruby to be surface-level. They're very different languages. Even the syntax isn't that similar once you get past your first impression.

But don't listen to me - take it from none other than José Valim, Elixir's creator:

> Folks tend to understate the influence of Erlang and overstate the influence of Ruby on Elixir. … Ruby did influence the syntax and the names in the standard library, but the latter was also done in a more "democratic" fashion: I would look into Ruby, JavaScript, Clojure, Haskell, and choose a name that was common and closer reflected the semantics that would fit Elixir (for example, the term "protocol" come from Clojure).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36604054

That’s encouraging to hear.

> There’s almost never a single clear and obvious way to do something.

You hit the nail with this one

"end" doesn't help.

The ambiguity caused by optional elements is what bothers me most. For this reason Ruby doesn't even have first class function calling syntax, since you are forced to use invoke on block objects.

What’s wrong with Ruby syntax?

One day humanity will recognize that people have divergent tastes in programming languages syntax that have no obvious rational basis.

Me curly brackets, you no curly brackets. Etc.

Today is not that day.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com