[leccine]

What is the advantage over Erlang? I guess this gives the syntactic sugar on the top of Erlang but I am not sure if this takes away the good parts of the language (pattern matching etc.) as well. Anyways, Erlang has a steep learning curve but if you invest the time it is pretty rewarding.

[rdtsc]

It is different. It doesn't have a 100% advantage. In some case it just sort of inverted the choice Erlang made -- lower case variables, vs upper case. Lower case module names vs upper case etc.

It has immutable data but not immutable bindings. Erlang has both as immutable. What that means is, you can do x = value1 then x = value2. In Erlang, like in mathematical notation, once you said X=value1 it is value1, it doesn't make sense to say X=value2 (it throws an exception). In either case you can't modify value1 in place for example by saying x[3]=4 or X[3]=4 ( <- I am making up syntax to illustrate here).

Some like it one way some like it another.

Elixir has better meta-programming, which is nice.

In general, Erlang syntax is not the steepest learning curve. The steepest learning curve is to learn to use actors for concurrency and use functional programming for sequential parts. Elixir presents a more familiar syntax but the other learning curve parts are still there.

[phamilton]

You are missing a much bigger piece. Protocols.

I can implement any data structure, and if I define reduce for that data structure I get the entire Enum module for free, all tail call optimized.

It means I can mix and match data structures. I can do crazy things like zip a binary search tree and a lazy data stream together and then call take(5) to get the first 5 elements. And all that is required is reduce to be defined for all data structures. Protocols are a big deal.

[scribu]

Erlang/Elixir noob here. Are you saying that protocols are a useful thing to learn in a) Erlang, b) Elixir or c) both?

[phamilton]

Protocols (and macros) are the real differences in Elixir that you don't have in Erlang.

The presence of protocols in Elixir enable many really cool features and designs that you wouldn't be able to do easily in Erlang.

[gargantuan]

Elixir has them built-in. They are basically an interface. A protocol says "this object implements this interface".

[peregrine]

I agree with this. Its not a panacea but in general it's way more developer friendly.

Especially when a good chunk of developers come to expect to have basics like strings and library/syntax to support them natively.

Erlang isn't horrible, and when you learn Elixir you WILL come to learn Erlang and its documentation.

[leccine]

Well you are making variables mutable. This is bad. One of the great features of Erlang and generally any functional programming language is immutability that makes defensive programming unnecessary. I would like to keep that... The rest of the stuff is great but it does not give enough value to me to not to use Erlang. Actors is a basic concept and message passing is definitely the way to go if you are building a distributed system. One of the biggest problems with Ruby and the imperative languages in general that it was designed for local execution so communication and distributing computation is more difficult than for example in Erlang.

[rdtsc]

When we talk about variables we usually talk about 2 different things. Values and bindings. Values are the data in the variables ( a list, a tuple, an object), and bindings are names that are used to refer to data ( what the variables is called).

So X = [1,2,3]. in gives you variable binding X and variable value [1,2,3]. Variable value [1,2,3] is immutable in both Elixir and Erlang. You cannot do x[0]=5 in either one and expect the value [1,2,3] to be modified in place. Binding X is immutable in Erlang but not in Elixir. In Erlang you'd do X1=[5,2,3]. and in Elixir you could do x=[5,2,3].

You can argue what is better. I think both approaches are good, there is not one clearly superior in my opinion. Sometimes I take your side and prefer Erlang, because I like having explicit and immutable variable bindings that don't change behind my back. If I make X=[1,2,3], it is going to be [1,2,3] from now until forever.

As far as Actor and distribution stuff all that goodness is still in Elixir. They complement each other more than compete. Both take advantage of the awesome VM (BEAM) -- which I think is a marvel of engineering -- concurrent garbage collection, lightweight processes, scheduling balancing, async IO background threads, binary references, distribution and so on.

[peregrine]

The variables are NOT immutable. The bindings ARE mutable.

a = [1,2,3,4]

x = a

x = [1,2,3,4,5]

a == [1,2,3,4] => true

x == [1,2,3,4,5] => true

This is empirically NOT the same as ruby or even mutability.

This is a HUGE misunderstanding of Elixir. Once something is created you cannot modify it, PERIOD, you can rebind variables within the same scope. You cannot change the values.

Same thing is possible in clojure, and nobody questions that its immutable.

EDIT: And to be extra clear this is only within the same function. Not possible across functions, modules or processes.

[peregrine]

In general, with elixir you get all the benefits of Erlang, pattern matching, light weight processes, OTP etc. But you also get Native UTF-8 Strings and String Handling. A modern Standard Library around common things like Dicts, Lists, Strings, Files, IO etc and modern documentation for all of it. You also get compile-time macro's and protocols which help reduce boilerplate and lets you easily extend your code. You also get a build in dependency and task management tool (mix).

All of this while basically living in erlang. You can call erlang functions with a slightly different syntax, :erlang_module.function_name, and you can natively use erlang packages and files with mix(it checks for rebar/makefiles and makes educated guesses on how to build them, or you can configure it).

If you think its a benefit of Erlang its probably also a benefit to Elixir.

EDIT: I also forgot you get things like the threading macro(|> from clojure et al), built in testing framework, and a VERY active and helpful community on irc #elixir-lang and the mailing list.

[brandonbloom]

It's worth noting that even Joe Armstrong, who designed Erlang, has said about Elixir: "This is good shit."

http://joearms.github.io/2013/05/31/a-week-with-elixir.html

[munificent]

Pattern matching is a core part of Elixir:

http://elixir-lang.org/getting_started/4.html