[erlang-questions] Any Erlang Devs Contemplating Elixir?

[Adam Rutkowski]

On Fri, Feb 26, 2016, at 23:00, Andrew Berman wrote:
> 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?

I was looking for a job with an opportunity to learn something new, I
guess I just needed a change. And I really wanted to stay in my OTP
comfort zone. The company I ended up working for was looking for Elixir
devs for the reason you've mentioned.

>
> 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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/A.
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