Hacker News Reader

Comment by hangonhn | Hacker News Reader

I've been wanting to learn Elixir for a long time but is it worth learning it without knowing Erlang first? I'm not against learning Erlang but just curious if Erlang is a good thing to know before tackling Elixir.

View on HN

Erlang is definitely worth learning but definitely not required by Elixir.

Learning the concepts that embody Erlang such as tail recursion and function matching, make Erlang worth learning. Erlang is also a special mix of Prolog and Lisp.

To add to this, Erlang is a very simple language that you can learn in just a few days. I don't know Elixir but I assume that, as is the case with Erlang, the more difficult thing to learn is OTP and not the language itself.

For me Erlang was worth learning because it's so interestingly different to many other languages because of its Prolog roots.

I only learned Elixir because the company I currently work for is an Elixir shop. I've basically ignored Erlang since I started here, other than the occasional library being Erlang.

I don't think it's really impeded my ability to learn or use Elixir. But I could also see how learning it and the underpinnings for Elixir could aid understanding too.

Yes, it is worth it to learn Elixir without learning Erlang, absolutely.

I consider myself expert-level at Elixir and did not learn Erlang first. Couldn't write a single line of Erlang today unaided if I tried.

I picked up Joe's Erlang book years after out of pure joy/curiosity.

Especially with LLMs, totally unnecessary.

You don't need to learn Erlang first.

It is absolutely 100% _not_ necessary to learn any Erlang at all before learning Elixir. I've been developing with Elixir for 5 years and still have never written a line of Erlang.

You don't need to learn OTP at first either — it'll just slow you down and confuse you. Learn Elixir syntax and semantics, learn how to build a Phoenix app or whatever, then dive into OTP once you're comfortable with the basics.

We've been running Elixir in production for 5+ years and most of our team only know some very basic erlang data structures for working with the :dbg module on live systems.

Erlang knowledge is not needed for building products with Elixir at all unless you want to go very in-depth.

~5 year pro elixir here, various systems in production, I don't know any erlang.

You can get very very far in Elixir without even knowing about an acronym called OTP.

Maybe not Erlang the language, but it’s useful to know its "philosophy" and what the BEAM is all about.

I built a whole startup in elixir from 0 to 1000+ active subscriptions. I don't know a lick of erlang.

That's pretty cool - what is it if you don't mind talking about it? How do you feel Elixir made it possible or easier. Or is it just something you happened to choose and you could have used Node or Rails or whatever else.

I was a nodejs engineerfor 7 years previously and had a lot of experience it. if you're building a backend, unless you're relying on a specific library or building a microservice, I think elixir/phoenix is a way better stack. being functional and having a pass by value by default, you avoid whole classes of errors you have to learn to look out for in node. While there was some initual challenge setting up autodiscover with libcluster, it means we were able to get away with not setting up a message queue or pubsub system or websocket infrasturcture since all that came out of the box. Additionally, creating services is as easy as adding a controller in rails. just use Genserver and add it to your supervisor file.

TLDR: sure i could have done it in node but it would have been a LOT more work and less reliable

Erlang is just fun to learn anyway even if you never use it. Fascinating language and history.

You do not need to know much, if any, Erlang to be productive in Elixir. Some libraries you might call will be written in Erlang, but those tend to have been around long enough that you don't need to look inside. Being able to read the Erlang docs can be helpful, because the OTP has a ton of helpful functions, but that's mostly just learning what Erlang calls its types.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com