tell me about elixir/erlang

>>61299011
Erlang is pretty awesome. Did a report on it earlier in the year. Really reliable. Everything has it's own "process" and you send messages between them in order to pass stuff around. These processes make it "object oriented" in the purest sense with each process handling it's own and messages the only way to get between them. Great for telecom or web servers where you need high reliability.

Elixir is a fork of Erlang that adds extra shit. Think of a c/c++ relationship

I learned both, elixir is cancer, tries too hard to be like ruby, go for erlang

What IDE is usable for them? Currently using Emacs and Alchemist package, but before picking up Elixir I bailed on Emacs twice already.

>>61299011
Erlang is pure, elixir is abomination. I honestly dont get the point of elixir except that it was made for people who are too dumb to learn erlang. They took erlang and literally implemented object oriented in it. It would have much easier just to write few c++ libraries for those rare instances where you need functional programming

>>61299060
>Everything has it's own "process" and you send messages between them in order to pass stuff around
So glorified OOP?

>>61301518
no.

it has nothing to do wit OOP.

erlang vm has virtual processes that can communicate even over the internet. ahey crsh they don't bring down the rest of your program, and can just be restarted etc.

Erlang is pretty clever, but unless you work for Sony Ericsson you will never use it much

>>61301561

Erlang is kind of OOP without inheritance or classes, and functional. Erlang is great at encapsulation, each process can be seen as an object with its own postbox, stack, heap and garbage collector.

Most of the code is functional in order to minimize state; so as to make the code easier to understand and debug.

The main design philosophy in Erlang seems to be "Do as little as possible, if something unexpected happens then crash with an error and let the supervisor process restart you in a good state". If an unrecoverable error happens in subprocess this should not drag other processes down with it.

Since almost all data shuffling is through message passing there is a lot of overhead. This trades efficiency for reliability which might be exactly what you want.

>>61299011
Niche languages that solve problems that 99.9% of programmers don't have. Also the Erlang VM is incredibly slow for everything but very simple networking. Text processing and number crunching is like 10x slower than already incredibly slow languages like Python and Ruby.

>>61301561
>ahey crsh they don't bring down the rest of your program

That's only if you implement your supervision tree correctly which most of the Elixir community doesn't do. It seems like most of the Elixir community doesn't understand OTP at all and just ignores errors completely.

>>61299011

Erlang has really great concepts, it's pretty minimalistic and worth studying even if you only use it for fun.

Elixir is basically Eralng, but it has much better I/O features and more beautiful syntax. Even the creator of Erlang said Elixir is pretty great.


Howevery, I'd always take a crash course in Erlang first and then decide:
If you are gonna do webdev, Elixir is the next step. If you go "deep down the rabbit hole", you should learn OTP and CouchDB next. OTP is basically a library for Erlang, but it just as big (or small) as Erlang itself.

Do it man, Erlang is nice.