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by Grimm1 2224 days ago
I was in the same boat until discovering elixir/erlang it has by far been the most approachable functional language for me and it has been a gateway drug of sorts into experimenting with ocaml and various lisps.

I personally think elixir is really special and an amazing fit for any project that needs high IO concurrency.
2 comments
dnautics 2224 days ago
IMO erlang (and arguably even more, elixir) is "functional for the working programmer". It doesn't drown itself in academic abstractions, uses functional programming as a tool to guardrail you from mistakes (in the same way that C guards the programmer from making asm mistakes), with escape hatches that are battle-tested and justified based on decades of experience.

I would say the only other functional language that has the same bent is Julia, which is "functional for the working scientist". It makes different choices about where to expose state, understandable, since scientific computing has different tradeoffs from systems programming.

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Grimm1 2223 days ago
Yeah I think that's a great way to frame it, historically one of the turn offs for me with FP was that it was overly academic when I am much more about how practical a tool the language is for what I'm trying to accomplish. Elixir was definitely the first FP that felt that way for me.

That said I have grown an appreciation for more esoteric languages and enjoy seeing the way they handle various problems it's just likely they'll never have a place in my toolkit.

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Cyph0n 2223 days ago
I think Scala is the ultimate "gateway" FP language, for better or worse. Kotlin would probably meet the requirements, though I've never used it.
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unvs 2224 days ago
Agreed! I found learning Elixir to be a great gateway to learn Erlang as well. When I first tried learning Erlang (before Elixir was released), it became a bit too much to wrap my head around. It was a lot easier when I had gotten the fundamentals of FP down through Elixir, though!
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Grimm1 2223 days ago
Yes definitely, I would have never even bothered with Erlang before using Elixir and having it introduce me in a friendly way to Erlang, which is a shame because honestly the EVM and OTP are amazingly strong at what they both do.
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