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Comment by nox_ | Hacker News Reader

Hah, yeah, let's port everything for no obvious reason.

There actually are good, obvious reasons to prefer Elixir to Erlang. Syntax is actually significant to productivity. For one quick example, Erlang requires you to terminate statements with either a comma, or a period, depending on whether it's the last statement in the section. If you move code around, you need to go back at the end and fix the commas and periods. Typically, this happens in the form of an error message, which leads to a tedious extra step that happens to me maybe 15 times a day when working with Erlang. That problem doesn't exist in Elixir. There are quite a few other nice things too. Elixir increases productivity in real ways.

The syntax reason doesn't matter to existing Erlang developers -- you get used to the Erlang syntax, same as any other syntax.

The meta-programming on the other hand may well be a huge draw to Erlang shops.

Erlang and Elixir play very well together. I imagine Erlang shops "moving to Elixir" will be in the form of Erlang shops hiring people with Ruby experience and letting them use Elixir so they can get up to speed faster.

Syntax is the least of your worries when learning a new language. Elixir isn't Ruby. Some new projects may be developed in Elixir but it will never supplant Erlang.

>Some new projects may be developed in Elixir but it will never supplant Erlang.

I vastly prefer Erlang syntax to Elixir's, but IMO it's way too early in the game to say this. In the unlikely event that the people who were attracted to Elixir because they couldn't handle Erlang's syntax can manage to grasp OTP, I imagine that Elixir would ultimately kill Erlang dead. An Erlang that has the same power and expressiveness, runs on the same VM, and is completely compatible - but looks like Algol - would be an irresistible force.

I knew Ruby pretty well before trying Erlang and used Erlang before trying Elixir -- I still find Erlang easier to write in that Elixir.

Elixir is more visually similar to Ruby, sure, buts its substantively not very similar, so the visual similarity is, if anything, a detriment, IMO.

Perhaps the problem is you used Erlang before trying Elixir.

For the typical programmer coming outside the Erlang/Elixir environment, Elixir is by far the more familiar and easier to pick up.

May be. It also may be that I have a lot less attachment to superficial syntactical similarity than lots of other people seem to -- I see lots of objections to languages not based on substance but based on the lack of familiar superficial structure, and that's not something that's really bothered me (one advantage, perhaps, of having learned -- even if only at a fairly superficial level in some cases -- several languages with radically different syntax in grade school), so "it superficially looks familiar" isn't bypassing, for me, a stumbling block lots of people seem to have.

In any case, yeah, I'm not saying that my personal Erlang vs. Elixir response is anything more than my personal response (or that Elixir isn't valuable; its certainly something I'd like to find time to explore more deeply and I think it has a lot to offer.)

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