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by sasa555
3951 days ago
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I've been doing full-time Erlang for five years, and I personally prefer Elixir. Elixir is semantically close to Erlang the language, and allows you to take advantage of all the great benefits of Erlang/OTP. It's benefit is dev's productivity. Creating OTP applications and releases is simpler, and there are tools in the language (e.g. macros, polymorphism via protocols, tidier stdlib), and around it (e.g. Hex package manager, mix tool, doc tests) that make developers' life simpler. All of this is possible in plain Erlang, but it's more cumbersome, and sometimes requires home-brewed solutions. Notice that I'm not discussing syntax at all, because it (mostly) doesn't matter. I actually like the Prologness of Erlang. What I dislike is that some chores require more of my time and yak shaving, compared to Elixir. |
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For example, a lot of my work tends to revolve around working with data. Processing large batches of data, parsing (often it comes in the shape of XML), transforming, filtering, ingesting it into databases, and so on. I can do this easily in Ruby, but performance issues has driven me to use Node.js or Go for new projects. With Go it's ridiculously easy to build efficient pipes that can parallelize each step to my liking, backpressure included. It's also trivial to build small command-line tools as well as specialized daemons. I have a world of libraries (and bindings to C libraries) at my disposal: AWS, image processing, transcoding, PostgreSQL, XML, JSON, it's all there. Go is also decent at Unicode and string manipulation.
I'm not wild about Go's performance, and everything I have seen of Erlang indicates that its performance is closer to that of Ruby or Node.js. Any comments here? Whenever I need to fire up anything related to batch processing in Ruby or Node.js, things take forever. Erlang's advantage here might be that it's easier to spawn remote processes to parallelize the workload.