A Week with Elixir

I'll take this opportunity to re-remind HN of Wadler's Law:

  In any language design, the total time spent discussing
  a feature in this list is proportional to two raised to
  the power of its position.
    0. Semantics
    1. Syntax
    2. Lexical syntax
    3. Lexical syntax of comments

http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Wadler's_Law

I admire Joe Armstrong. He has tremendous experience and yet he is very humble (at least, say if you compare him with Linus). He is quite up there in age, where lots of people sort of give up and move to Florida to retirement homes. Joe still programs, explores new languages, writes Erlang books (he has a new one coming out soon), gives talks. You can tell from his voice he is still passionate and excited about programming, about fault tolerance and about distributed systems.

Slight quibble: his JS example is a bit contrived. He gives the following:

    js> a = 5;
    5
    js> f = function(x) { return x+a }; 
    function (x){return x+a}
    js> f(10)
    15
    js> a = 100
    100
    js> f(10)
    110

Well, yes, this is true, but it's not a problem with JS' closures, it's a problem with its variable declaration. a is declared as a global variable by default. Yes, this is bad, and everyone knows it's bad, but it's a bit orthogonal to closures. It's very simple to solve this in JS:

    js> a = 5;
    5
    js> f = function (x) { var a = 5; return x + a };
    function(x){var a;return x+a}
    js> f(10)
    15
    js> a = 100
    100
    js> f(10)
    15

Elixir sounds very nice! Thanks for sharing the link.

It's really exciting to see functional programming beginning to be recognized by more and more developers. It looks like Elixir will be a great language to help that trend grow.

Some previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5798049

Does anyone know if the Elixir team took these comments into account? (The post if from May 2013)