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by mononcqc 4317 days ago
What do you mean by 'improves on Erlang's programming model'?

I've seen it improves on some tools and a fair deal of libraries, but I don't exactly see how it improves on the programming model itself?

1 comments

I realize now it sounds as if Erlang got something wrong and Elixir got it right instead. That's not what I wanted to say.

Elixir semantics is very close to Erlang's, but it also has things beyond what Erlang can offer as easily: macros, protocols, comprehensions with any kind of enumerable as a generator.

Of course, the core facilities provided by the runtime system are left unchanged: concurrency primitives, functional semantics, distribution, error handling (Elixir has slightly different conventions, but the idea of "letting it crash" remains). And in OTP land there are quite a few additions that simply make OTP more "elixirish" (like getting a lazy stream of events from GenEvent).