[erlang-questions] Why Learn Elixir if it's built on Erlang? Why not just learn Erlang?

[Hakim Fajardo]

Everyone, thank you for the feed back. I agree the syntax of Elixir feels
simpler and easier to understand. Either way, I enjoy learning both and I
guess I will get to a point where I will clearly understand the advantages
of Both. Happy Coding!

On Tue, Feb 13, 2018 at 3:28 AM, Oliver Korpilla <Oliver.Korpilla@REDACTED>
wrote:

>
> Hello, Hakim.
>
> At my workplace I did a 1 1/2 year project in elixir that eventually grew
> to have a few dozen developers in it. This was in the 2016/2017 timeframe.
>
> I was actually the one who evaluated first Erlang, then elixir and then
> chose elixir. The reason was simple: The syntax was a big driver of
> adoption and teaching it to other people. We had way more problems with
> Erlang syntax and quirks than we had with some of the choices made in
> elixir's language design. In a workplace where Python is common knowledge
> and often Ruby is, too, I simply had an easier time convincing people to
> adopt the less "alien-looking" elixir.
>
> Your mileage may of course differ.
>
> I personally feel very at home with elixir constructs like the Pipe
> operator to structure my code and make it more readable. The closer a
> language gets to write to how I think, the better. We also had people
> wanting to experiment in reactive patterns, etc.
>
> Adopting elixir also had its quirks, too, of course. It took me quite a
> while to find some things documented, I was figuring out myself how to
> reuse gen_fsm state machines because there was no "elixir-ism" layered over
> it. I indeed kept referring back to the extensive Erlang and OTP
> documentation all the time. (We eventually adopted elixir 1.3 as our final
> version.)
>
> mix, elixir's build tool, did what we wanted and I eventually came to
> appreciate distillery as well.
>
> I must admit we practically made no use of features like elixir macros
> because I always ran into trouble when trying to do that. Having a basic
> proficiency with Lisp macros I still struggled with how elixir was doing it
> and ran into unexpected snags there, eventually giving up on it. I have to
> admit, it was not really missed. In some cases, libraries relying on macros
> to build their basic constructs could be harder to understand, even though
> we used only very basic ones like the "amnesia" wrapper around Mnesia.
>
> Being able to mix (ha!) elixir with Erlang was a big boon because you
> could always fall back to Erlang if that was easier or needed. Erlang was
> like a conservative (in the adopting of features sense) base on which we
> started using newer elixir features where more experimenting with
> broadening the language were done. When it came to the underlying BEAM
> infrastructure one will always refer back to the documentation at the
> Erlang pages, and sometimes things can be harder to find because first you
> have to find out what of Erlang's feature set you access how from the
> elixir/mix/distillery amalgam.
>
> The project is still an example to many of us how rapidly a complex
> networked application can be built and changed when leveraging OTP. It
> still excels in many features over its successor - which was built in C++.
> A management decision. Sigh. Some of us are still trying to apply the
> lessons learned from that project into our work today.
>
> Hope this helps,
> Oliver
>
>
> Gesendet: Dienstag, 13. Februar 2018 um 03:48 Uhr
> Von: "Hakim Fajardo" <keam7095@REDACTED>
> An: "Erlang/OTP discussions" <erlang-questions@REDACTED>
> Betreff: [erlang-questions] Why Learn Elixir if it's built on Erlang? Why
> not just learn Erlang?
>
> I've been spending time teaching my self Elixir and Erlang. But I can't
> help but ask why learn Elixir if's built on top of Erlang? Why not just
> learn Erlang. I enjoy learning both but what's the point?
>
> I find myself constantly referring back to the Erlang Manual to understand
> Elixir. It feels redundant.
>
> Any experienced Erlang/Elixir users have thoughts?
>
> Best,_______________________________________________ erlang-questions
> mailing list erlang-questions@REDACTED http://erlang.org/mailman/
> listinfo/erlang-questions
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/attachments/20180213/6e0a34af/attachment.htm>