mnd

Why would you stop learning?

You misunderstand me. I did not say that Elixir is not different from Erlang, what I said already two times and this is the third time is that you cannot send me to some case study about how code deployed on the Erlang virtual machine performs well at high traffic and imply that the performance seen is a quality of Elixir, because it is not. Can we agree on this? That is the one and only point that I was trying to make, and if you read carefully and want to understand I think I have expressed that thought in a quite clear way. It is also a very factual truth, not a subjective matter, when we discuss syntax preference we do not discuss throughput because throughput is not a quality of the syntax. Even less so in the case of Elixir which runs on top of the Erlang virtual machine. Performance could be discussed as a function of syntax if, for instance, Elixir compiled to virtual machine instructions for the Erlang virtual machine and then had its own layer of optimizations etc. and then there would be some inherent quality of the Elixir syntax which makes those optimizations easier. But the fact of the matter is that Elixir compiles to Erlang which is then compiled to instructions for the virtual machine. Yes, Elixir it’s just syntax, I suggest you read its source code and not take my word for it. There is nothing incredible that Elixir has invented, it just looks like Ruby which made it easier to read by ex-Ruby programmers, that’s all.

Yes, of course I am biased to have a problem towards Elixir programmers making extraordinary claims when they lack cultural knowledge and brag about things that have not been invented by Elixir in any way but are qualities of a system which they very much enjoy criticizing in ignorance. I have even heard Elixir programmers talking about a so-called Elixir virtual machine which I find amazing and tells me a lot about their community and culture.

Except that “rockets” built with Erlang have been aerodynamic, production-ready, and deployed some 20 years before Elixir has even existed and they are still in use today. They did not start breaking off and, yes, they actually went to space, as opposed to what you imply in a very sneaky way in your first statement. If you want to be fair, you can say that Elixir is another skin of Erlang, the other way around does not hold.

What you said is equivalent to a Python programmer saying that adding semantical value to the “end” keyword in Ruby is unnecessarily awful because you can achieve the same by giving meaning to the indentation level. It’s an entirely subjective matter.

I would also like to point out that Erlang has also very good support and has seen adoption in some very critical systems as opposed to CRUD web applications which is the main domain of Elixir. Most of Ericsson’s products use Erlang to a certain degree, there are a lot of banking systems and aviation systems which make use of Erlang as well, quite a few Internet companies use it to great success, and many more.

And by the way, the semantic meaning of “;” and “.” is an awful lot similar to their use in the English language, you are blowing it out of proportions. This is a trivial thing which you learn after a 10 minutes introduction to Erlang. For me, personally, if one has a problem understanding the meaning of “;” and “.” or learning a new syntax for that matter, I can easily conclude that I probably should not give that person any decision power in designing systems.

My point was not that everything which is written in Elixir can be written in Erlang but mostly that using a reference to a system that sustains a large amount of traffic which is implemented in Elixir and runs on top of the Erlang virtual machine as an argument for how incredible Elixir is, is naive at best, as Elixir is just a layer on top of many Erlang libraries and also the Erlang virtual machine. Yes, syntax can matter, but you can discuss that later when you discuss maintainability and other software design and maintenance issues. You cannot discuss syntax and then argue that your program sustains large amounts of traffic; you can, but it’s pointless.

And to answer your first question, although I thought I was very clear that I do not want to take part in your discussion with the parent: no, I do not think that you are a bad programmer for learning Elixir, I think if you were to only learn Elixir, call it a day, and then spread the word of how incredible Elixir is, you would be, however. Programming languages are just that, programming languages. The more you know the better and there is no silver bullet. As you will get back to Haskell you will probably come to appreciate its powers. Also, the fact that you have not grasped Haskell’s syntax when you have first tried does not make it a poor functional programming language and it certainly does not make Elixir a better designed functional programming language. That’s just your perception because Elixir was, for you, easier to learn. The fact that I cannot comprehend particle physics does not necessarily make particle physics a badly designed model.

Concurrency is not parallelism. You conflate parallelism with concurrency in your comments both here and above. I should also mention that for a big part of its life the Erlang virtual machine has had no support for parallelism. Erlang was not invented to solve parallelism so your hypothesis is downright wrong. Parallelism was just a consequence of the concurrency which was not exploited by the Erlang virtual machine until a much later point. And yes, if you read the paper I have referred to in my previous comment you will happily find out exactly the reasons for why Erlang was invented and what sort of problems it has solved. Also, to clarify, I did not claim that you were wrong about Amdahl’s law; you are however completely wrong in your claim that Erlang has brought nothing new other than supervisors and hot code reloading to the table.

Unrelated to your discussion with the parent, but I just wanted to point out that the fact that a system which was implemented in Elixir and runs on the Erlang virtual machine is able to sustain that traffic (and here I am referring to the link you posted) is and should be regarded as, largely, a quality of the Erlang virtual machine, and only to a very small extent to the programming language that it has been implemented in, if any at all. The fact that a system implemented in Elixir can sustain a large quantity of traffic while running on the Erlang virtual machine does not prove much about Elixir itself, other than the fact that it’s usable; you can implement the exact same system in Erlang also, or any other programming language for that matter. There is no inherent quality of Elixir itself that makes programs handle large amounts of traffic. That’s a quality of the Erlang virtual machine; Elixir is just syntax.

Erlang was invented 30 years ago to solve problems that were not easily solvable by the back then prevalent programming languages. The claim that Erlang hasn’t brought anything new to the table couldn’t be further from the truth. Designing concurrent, fault-tolerant programs was not a problem solved in a satisfying way by the programming languages and technologies that were mainstream back then, which is exactly why Ericsson pursued the path of inventing their own programming language. I suggest everyone to read Joe Armstrong’s paper “Making reliable distributed systems in the presence of software errors”. It’s easy to read and mind expanding even if you do not intend to use Erlang. It can also save one from public embarrassment when one claims ridiculous things as parent and many other remarks in the other comments.

Erlang is a great programming language after one takes the time to understand the principles underlying it and its design. Everything fits very nicely into place. There are definitely things that could be done better, but then that’s the case with most programming languages and technologies after they have accumulated some dust. Elixir on the other hand, in my personal opinion, is a false prophet simply because it looks like something which it isn’t. It looks like Ruby and gives the programmer the feeling that he’s right at home, except it is in fact a very different beast with very different semantics, Erlang semantics, as opposed to Ruby. Therefore, if you want to program on the BEAM (the Erlang virtual machine) you better make sure you actually understand the system, its design, principles and also some of the semantics of Erlang itself, point at which you might as well just learn Erlang. I’m not saying that you cannot learn those things coming from Elixir, I’m just saying that if you want to build systems of reasonable complexity (like the ones that Erlang is known for) on top of the Erlang virtual machine, as opposed to CRUD web applications, then you must understand a lot more than just Elixir or Phoenix.