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Comment by bphogan | Hacker News Reader

This is a great list. I appreciate this. I have to add that your last entries are really important. Elixir is great, but I'm finding more and more that I have to dig into Erlang to do many, many things, because Elixir doesn't have that many libraries yet. Things like basic hashing have to be done using Erlang, so knowing the Erlang standard library seems to be pretty important right now.

And yea, you're not going very far without digging into OTP, and Martin Logan's book is pretty excellent. Great entry on this list.

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A lot of that is by design. It's my understanding that they made the decision not to wrap erlang standard libraries just for the sake of wrapping them, because the erlang standard libaries work just fine when called from elixir.

If something needed to be wrapped to make it play more nicely with elixir, for example to change argument order to better suit elixir's |> operator, or if there were other real benefits to wrapping an erlang library, then they might wrap it. Otherwise if the erlang library is good just use the erlang library.

Yea, that's what I figured. But I don't like it so much. I tend to end up wrapping it myself just because I like piping with |>.

But my main point was that when I started, I could just look to one source for language docs.

But as I dug in, I realized that to do a lot of things, I needed to look at Erlang too. And then I realized I had to understand it.

It's not bad, it's just a thing that makes learning the awesome language a lot more difficult.

Agree completely.

For me its all about OTP, thats the difference maker with Elixir/Erlang, without that its just another functional language, with it is an incredibly powerful tool/framework for building impressive distributed fault tolerant systems.

I agree with you so much. I find myself digging into Erlang docs more and more.

That being said, I think there needs to be a communal effort to improve Erlang documentation. It is very terse. One of the points brought up in Garret Smiths talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MvKLOecT1I

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