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by seancribbs 4736 days ago
Elixir has some good things about it (hygienic macros, protocols, and so on) but the syntax is not enough by itself to make us switch. "Ugh, Erlang syntax sucks" is a refrain heard around the Internet, but it has not hindered us from getting good engineers who are happy to develop with it. I daresay that the syntax is the least of your problems when learning Erlang; the message-passing concurrency and fault-tolerance models, and functional style are more difficult to understand. Those problems don't go away when you use Elixir instead.

If you want something Scheme-like on the Erlang runtime, there's LFE (Lisp-Flavored Erlang): https://github.com/rvirding/lfe
2 comments
rdtsc 4736 days ago
> I daresay that the syntax is the least of your problems when learning Erlang; the message-passing concurrency and fault-tolerance models, and functional style are more difficult to understand.

That's my feel as well. I hear tirades about commas and periods. What are they going to do when they hit a net-split.

Bashing Erlang and stopping at syntax is like bashing a new battle tank because it doesn't have a leather interior. Yeah it is nice if it had leather seats and a mini fridge but if that is really the main criteria used in picking it, one has to wonder...

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tiglionabbit 4736 days ago
Neat! Does it come in Haskell flavor too?
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