Livebook: Elixir's Swiss Army Knife | Hacker News Reader

Livebook: Elixir's Swiss Army Knife

thestackcanary.com

49 pointsmike1o110 comments

In addition to all of our (I'm the DockYard CEO) DockYard Academy training material being written as a Livebook we are also working on the upcoming LiveView Native guides being written as a Livebook along with a self-contained Phoenix instance so you can develop your first LiveView Native apps interactively and see them render as you go in both the Xcode simulator and (eventually) the Android simulator. If/when we get to WinUI3 we'll try to do the same.

Livebook is incredibly powerful and versatile. When the general population finally wakes up to how insanely powerful Elixir is for such little effort, cost, and time to build (compared to other options) they will find an incredibly mature ecosystem of tools and resources ready for consumption.

> When the general population finally wakes up to how insanely powerful Elixir is for such little effort, cost, and time to build (compared to other options) they will find an incredibly mature ecosystem of tools and resources ready for consumption.

Agree, and I'm eagerly awaiting this day!

Don't feel obligated to answer, but how has LiveView changed DockYard's approach to PWAs? Are you still pro-PWA? Do you still see (much) room for PWAs in a LiveView world?

We've given up on PWAs. I ran DY as a web-only shop but when I left at the end of 2019 the very first product I wanted to develop was a native app. There's just too many screens now that PWAs can't even hope to deploy to. (watch, tv, AR/VR) So when I came back I wanted to find a way that we could add native as a service offering but not dilute our expertise in Elixir. This is mostly where LiveView Native came from.

Livebook / scripting from a workbook has been a huge boost for my workflow over the last few years. And in the last 6 months even more so, now I have a full editor and autocomplete with copilot for scripting (with context of all my scripts).

Playbooks at work, exploration in personal projects, 80% of my terminal use is now driven by an editor and sending snippets to the terminal.

(I know this is more common for emacs and lisp users, but never really managed to get into that workflow myself, until livebook)

My only gripe is that livebook itself doesn’t love reloading if I edit the source files directly, and I’d like to get that working.

I'd be interested in how to get a nice workflow going with livebook and a local mix project. Right now I do

   iex --sname some-name --cookie some-cookie -S mix

And then in the livebook, go to the runtime settings, select "Attached Node" and enter the name and cookie.

It seems kind of inconvenient to have to do this every time, and also I don't get any automatic hot reloading of modules in the livebook when I edit files directly, so I just end up copying files into the livebook to edit them. Maybe there is a nicer way?

Wish I could just `mix livebook.start` or something to open a livebook attached to the current mix project. Or have that be the behaviour when opening the notebook file by default.

Edit: I just saw this comment from the previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37035686

This might be what I want actually!

I think this may solve live reloading in Livebook for you: https://github.com/jonatanklosko/mix_install_watcher

For vim users, check out vim-slime[1]. It's really changed my workflow! It can work for any language that uses a REPL, including bash/shell. Combined with tmux, it is an amazing and (in hindsight) obvious tool. I honestly can't imagine myself going back to not having it now.

[1]: https://github.com/jpalardy/vim-slime

Interestingly, I had a similar workflow in the past where I wanted to edit scripts with vim and have liveview reload them. I tried to ask for this and even offered to work on a PR, but they weren't interested (at the time at least, this was a couple of years ago).

A discussion a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36995940

I'm impressed that .livemd is markdown; will we finally have literate programming once no one explicitly notices that they've adopted it?

eg https://www.thestackcanary.com/serving-spam-detection-with-x...

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