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

[zxq9]

On 2018年2月12日 月曜日 21:48:30 Hakim Fajardo wrote:
> 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?

Hi, Hakim.

Having worked in both, I emphatically prefer Erlang as a language. It still has some warts, but they aren't metastasizing the way such things so commonly do in other languages. In this respect I view Erlang's extremely slowing changing nature as a language to be one of its greatest features. It is a small language and looks like it will remain so.

The tooling that Elixir has built around it is more convenient, though.
That said, the importance of "convenient tooling" drops dramatically as a project's size goes up.

I'm hoping to bring some tools out for Erlang that bridge the tooling gap at least a little, but I'm not quite there yet (real life keeps getting in the way).

My 2c.

-Craig