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by dimgl 1545 days ago
Yes, it absolutely is. The few times I did work with Elixir I came across a few instances where I had to use libraries that had not been ported over to Elixir yet so I had to deal with Erlang. It wasn't fun.

That being said, I think it's only one of the issues affecting Elixir adoption. Elixir, while undoubtedly a great language, is not very easy to use. The docs have a huge focus on the language and its syntax, but don't really hold the hand of developers of imperative languages who want to understand the paradigm of functional programming.

It took me an obscenely long amount of time for me to understand how a GenServer works, and how the entrypoints for an application work. This is a big pain point with learning Elixir and every time I come back to it I have to do this big mental overhead that IMO just isn't productive.
3 comments
alberth 1545 days ago
> I had to use libraries that had not been ported over to Elixir yet so I had to deal with Erlang

Why do these libraries need to be ported to Elixir at all?

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dimgl 1545 days ago
IIRC they don't, but as someone who doesn't know Erlang, the Erlang documentation was really hard to read and the APIs differed from other Elixir libraries.
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srevenant 1545 days ago
+100 — the heart of the problem
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wink 1544 days ago
Imagine it's an important lib you can't just replace and there's a bug you need fixed and can't just wait for the maintainer to do it for you. Now you suddenly need to understand that language enough to do that. To some extent this happens very often, I've had it in Clojure+Java and PHP+C libraries.
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srevenant 1544 days ago
Exactly the problem I've run into on more than one occasion. And the erlang libs I'm referencing have almost zero documentation, so it really means "RTFC" which then is painful :D
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freedomben 1545 days ago
This last part is really important. If you don't already know what GenServer or Application or Supervisor are/do, finding out from just the docs or internet posts is extremely hard.
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konfusinomicon 1545 days ago
did you have an aha moment that finally made it all (genservers and entry points) make sense? if so, what was it?
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