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by cultofmetatron 1277 days ago
I built my startup on elixir.

Once you get past the syntax, a lot of the day to day thinking about how to model your solution in the context of the system is similar. to the point that I'd say elixir is Clojure with a ruby like syntax. elixir has let bindings but they are implicit and blend into the language. you don't really think about them. At the same time, you have all teh standard fare of a functional enough language without all the type ceremony.

Id say its more convenient to work with elixir day to day. Less tracking of parenthesis and the code naturally comes out looking more uniform. There is the price that macros are harder to write in elixir. That is not to say its difficult but lisps in general make writing a macro so damn easy that anything else feels difficult in comparison. I think its a good compromise. Its just difficult enough to make avoid creating macros until you REALLY need them.

1 comments

Elixir doesn't have the same problem of everyone building their own framework each time they build an application, though. Almost every web project uses Phoenix and inherits a whole series of tools and practices that less experienced devs would never think of until it is too late. Every database project uses Ecto with its well-typed schemas and changeset validations etc. Clojure has equivalent things but you have to not only find them, but first find the need for them.