Hacker News Reader

Comment by devinus | Hacker News Reader

As a professional Erlang developer who now develops with Elixir, I need to stop this right here. This is NOT just about syntax. Elixir simply is not just a pretty face for Erlang, but enables metaprogramming that is simply NOT possible in Erlang without writing 10x more code. Elixir comes with it's own standard library, HashDict, Reducers, and more and more. I'll have to write another blog post, because this misconception that Elixir is just a prettier syntax is somehow still around.

View on HN

I apologize for my misconceptions and I would really enjoy reading such a blog post. Do you have an address or RSS feed I could check in at later? At the risk of making another bad estimation, I still feel like (at this point in time anyway) you still need to know Erlang and OTP to understand and appreciate Elixir.

As an aside, have you seen Joxa? It's a LISP for the Erlang VM. I'm really not trying to be a downer about this, I think it's great that the Erlang VM is having these new languages pop up and José Valim is one of my favorite Ruby programmers, so I have high hopes for Elixir. I hope after I get better at Erlang I can revisit Elixir and appreciate the things you are talking about.

I'll begin writing it this weekend and publish it to my blog next week: http://devintorr.es/ (Atom feed: http://devintorr.es/atom.xml)

You should link to it on your profile: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=devinus

Finished that blog post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5864434

So exactly like Coffee - it enables you to do class-based inheritance and mixins which is NOT possible in JavaScript... without writing 10x more code.

Standard library of Elixir should be available to pure Erlang too, right? From what I recall from interoperability docs.

Could you post a tiny little example of metaprogramming in Elixir that would appeal to quite experienced Erlang developer who knows about parse transforms? I am NOT dismissing Elixir, I know too little about it and I want to finally learn about some feature that would convince me to learn some Elixir.

1) Do you also think of e.g. Scala as the CoffeeScript of Java? Scala : Java :: Elixir : Erlang

2) Yes, interoperability is there and, just like you can use Scala libraries from Java, you just need the Elixir runtime in your path.

3) My favorite is from the String.Unicode module:

    defmodule String.Unicode do
      # ...

      def upcase(""), do: ""

      lc { codepoint, upper, _lower, _title } inlist codes, upper && upper != codepoint do
        def upcase(unquote(codepoint) <> rest) do
          unquote(upper) <> upcase(rest)
        end
      end

      def upcase(<< char, rest :: binary >>) do
        << char >> <> upcase(rest)
      end

      # ...
    end

Ok, I'm almost convinced - at least I'll give Elixir a try after I finish with Joxa. Any tips for someone who would like to learn Elixir fast? Is the "Getting Started" on Elixir page OK or should I search somewhere else?

As for Scala and CoffeeScript... well, that's a tough one. On some level they are very similar, but the differences are huge. I'd say they both, and Elixir, are in the same class of things with CS being on the lower level than Scala and Elixir.

Yes, the Getting Started guide is great. There is also Dave's book[1] and many talks done by José and Yurii[2].

[1]: http://pragprog.com/book/elixir/programming-elixir [2]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m32CGvzixrQ

Introducing Elixir by Simon St Laurent is coming out soon. I read a pre-release version and it is exactly what you want.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com