[erlang-questions] Any Erlang Devs Contemplating Elixir?

[Andrew Berman]

Hey Adam,

Good to hear that your experience is positive.  Did you settle on Elixir
because you were writing it for a Ruby shop?  In other words, did you
choose it because you have a team of Ruby devs and thought it might be
easier to migrate them?

On Fri, Feb 26, 2016 at 1:41 PM Adam Rutkowski <hq@REDACTED> wrote:

> Hi Andrew,
>
> As a die hard, long time Erlang fan, who recently switched to Elixir
> full-time I can probably share my perspective.
> For the past 6 or 7 months I have been writing Elixir code for a Ruby shop
> seeking their way out ;-)
>
> At the beginning it was extremely tough. Needless to say, I have never
> written a single line in Ruby before,
> I was unfamiliar with Rails (some of the concepts/terminology obviously
> was transferred to Phoenix),
> and everything seemed just plain weird since I got very accustomed to the
> rough obviousness of Erlang/OTP.
>
> The switch wasn't easy for me -- at least I had the OTP part figured out.
>
> But as I soon found out, expecting Elixir to be "Ruby on BEAM" is an
> oversimplification.
> Today I think it's a very nicely designed language combining more than
> just that.
>
> Plug is brilliant, definitely brings Clojure's Ring to mind. Think easily
> accessible, composable cowboy middlewares.
> They're really fun to build and easy to test.
>
> Ecto is *the* killer app. Being able to abstract my postgres schema with
> ease is something I always
> craved in the Erlang world (not to mention the gazillion of epgsql forks).
> Today I can use postgres almost to its full potential. PG views
> transparently map to predefined
> structs, arrays & maps (jsonp) are supported via type casting, the query
> interface is again,
> composable and powerful (borrows from LINQ) and doesn't do any magic you
> would expect
> from popular, "classic" ORMs. Migrations works as expected, rolling back a
> schema change requires
> no effort.
>
> Protocols (again, Clojure?) and modules, that can be aliased and
> selectively imported
> allow you to nicely organise large codebases into logical chunks of
> responsibilities.
>
> In general, I fear not anymore. Elixir is well tested, carefully crafted
> and evolves very dynamically.
> I still love Erlang, but I don't think I made a mistake of trying Elixir
> out in the real world.
> I like its expressiveness and the fact that there's still OTP available
> for me to use.
> It's fun.
>
> Cheers & happy hacking,
>
> /A.
>
>
> On Fri, Feb 26, 2016, at 19:28, Andrew Berman wrote:
>
> Hey Fellow Erlangers,
>
> I was curious if any of you guys have switched or are contemplating using
> Elixir for your next project. I've been programming Erlang for a while now,
> but I'm about to start a new project and wanted to see where other Erlang
> devs stood on it.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Andrew
>
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