Collateral Damage

[Austin Ziegler]

I disagree that there’s no bashing. Look through the most recent thread and
the previous thread about this EEP and you’ll see people expressing some
pretty rank opinions. Additionally, saying "we don’t want Erlang to become
Elixir" is essentially a content-free statement. Someone took the time to
write up an EEP *complete with examples*, and it gets rejected by the
community not on its merits (or lack thereof), but simply because "ew,
looks too much like Elixir, we’re screwing up the language if we do this".
Paraphrased, but not excessively so.

I’m a development manager in an Elixir shop (it’s not the only language we
use). We’re clear that we develop with Elixir, even though we would
absolutely interview someone with an Erlang background. And as a
development manager, I can say that we would absolutely prefer most of our
code to be in Elixir, but would have little problem implementing part of
the code in Erlang, if it made sense to do so. (The beauty of the Elixir
tooling is that doing that is trivial.)

-a

On Mon, Apr 25, 2022 at 11:26 AM Michael Malter <airlangue@REDACTED> wrote:

> Come on, there is no bashing. Most of us prefer Erlang and don't want
> Erlang to become Elixir, that is all.
>
> That simple view seems very difficult to accept for some Elixir folks.
> That's fine, we won't cry.
>
> The linguistic metaphor is useful there. It's hard for non english
> language to survive nowadays. There is a network effect, universal language
> tend to develop uniformity.
>
> Aside from that, there might be some saltiness. The following happened to
> me multiple times:
> - I apply to a job with an erlang resume
> - people are impressed "wow, the guy does Erlang"
> - turns out "yeah it's very cool that you know Erlang well but do it in
> Elixir anyway". It even happens on fresh projects.
> - Me: "Why. I'll be way faster in Erlang, that is what I know."
> -????
> - Frustration
>
> Le lun. 25 avr. 2022 à 16:29, Onorio Catenacci <
> onorio.catenacci.3@REDACTED> a écrit :
>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> If you don't like the proposal, that's your privilege.  I see no reason
>> to bash on Elixir due to your dislike of this particular proposal though.
>> I do believe (and I'm sure I will be corrected if I'm wrong) that Elixir
>> has had a few positive contributions to Erlang and, of course, Elixir
>> couldn't exist without Erlang.  Erlang and Elixir can both be great
>> languages on the BEAM and can both prosper without either of them
>> bad-mouthing the other.
>>
>> I don't hear people running down LFE or Gleam--but I don't think either
>> of those languages has achieved the success that Elixir has either so I
>> guess that makes some sense.
>>
>> I can certainly understand the passion that people feel about Erlang and
>> I can certainly understand being disappointed in seeing a great language
>> sort of bypassed by something that some could consider a shiny-new-object
>> of a language but I don't think that's a fair assessment.
>>
>> I don't see Erlang vs. Elixir as a zero-sum game and I think it's a pity
>> that so many people who are contributing a lot of otherwise good,
>> insightful commentary seem to feel that's the situation. I really think
>> there's room for both to grow and thrive.  And thank goodness people are
>> starting to recognize the importance of having a good language/RT to
>> building scalable systems.
>>
>> --
>> Onorio
>>
>>
>>

-- 
Austin Ziegler • halostatue@REDACTED • austin@REDACTED
http://www.halostatue.ca/ • http://twitter.com/halostatue
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