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Comment by ryan-duve | Hacker News Reader

I just learned Erlang this year and I love the syntax. Ending expressions with periods took getting used to, but capital first letters distinguishing variables, non-rebindable variables, semicolons between function clauses, a lack of boilerplate (defmodule et al), a fraction of end keywords, commas separating expression, ... all make for a very fun to use and ergonomic language, IMO.

I haven't tried Gleam yet, though. I'm interested in the focus on simplicity but a little wary because I understand they sacrificed niceties to minimize the language footprint, e.g., pattern matching in function heads. I intend to give it a shot the next time I'm greenfielding something.

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Erlang is my favorite functional language out of all the ones I've tried. The matchers, guards, etc are all done very well. But I don't like functional. I used to think it was cool, gave it a real chance using Erlang for years, and eventually decided it's not a good fit for many use cases. Like at some point the neatness of doing all loops as recursion wears off and it's just tiring. It's not like CS algo homework, and even there you often want DP/memoization.

Edit: pure* functional

> Like at some point the neatness of doing all loops as recursion wears off and it's just tiring.

Odd, but I believe you, lol. Elixir's list comprehensions take a `:reduce` option which makes accumulating values a bit more "familiar" and I often use over `reduce`:

    for a <- list, reduce: []
      acc ->
        [a | acc]
    end

Not sure if there is something like that in Erlang (or Gleam for that matter).

If you already have a list in Erlang, you can use map and the foldl/foldr reducers. But there's no general for-loop. You're expected to use tail recursion.

Also tbh, I don't like reduce either. I agree with that article posted on HN a while back about devs not liking reduce. Just want to insert into my list or whatever, not have to check how exactly reduce works in this particular language.

> you can use map and the foldl/foldr reducers

Ya, I was saying as an alternative to a more dynamic-looking loop. And I should note that `for` is confusing in Elixir because it is not a for loop, it's a list comprehension. Also, `<-` is actually a match operator and can cause confusion if you think of it as a for loop. I'm actually not sure why they went with `for`. At one point it was `lc`. I do think `for` is better than `lc`, heh.

But yes, I don't hate reduce, but I do try and avoid it in favour of a higher level version if its available. My only real problem with reduce is that I sometimes forget the parameter order, which is why I like using list comprehensions since the accumulator gets labelled.

The "for" might be inspired by Python list comprehension

I'm pretty sure it's just inspired by `for` from several languages to give the illusion that "Elixir has a `for` loop" for beginners? Actually, as I say that out loud I'm unsure. Who knows!

I was fortunate enough to use Erlang professionally for a couple of years. I agree: the syntax is quite comfortable.

I'm the same. I thought I was an oddball because so many people seemed to prefer Elixir but I like Erlang and its syntax. I wish I had more chances to use it at work but so far it's just been for hobby projects or playing with.

There are dozens of us! Erlang is a great language, elixir just feels kinda flimsy and over-macro’d to me somehow.

What was your background before Erlang? I came from Ruby, so Elixir felt much more like home than Erlang.

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