[emiller829]

Really happy to see the 1.0 milestone reached. I've enjoyed my time with Elixir. It's really approachable, and made a lot of Erlang/OTP concepts start to click for me in ways that they just hadn't, before.

Syntactically, it's a pleasure to use as a long-time Ruby guy, which I suppose is no surprise given José's presence in the Ruby community.

However, all of this aside, what makes me the most excited about Elixir is José, himself. It's been my experience that when a language/framework has a BDFL, something of that person gets infused into its community. Anyone who's interacted with José will tell you he's an incredibly friendly, humble, and downright thankful person.

Elixir is set up for success in so many ways, but the community aspect is the one we just can't afford to ignore.

[turnip1979]

Lack of jobs is a problem :( It is a nice language but has stiff competition from Go.

[hderms]

I had some limited experience with Go, and some limited experience with elixir, but I walked away feeling like Elixir is better for making distributed systems. I guess the learning curve for Elixir is way higher if someone has no experience with functional languages, but the benefits are probably greater as well.

If I wanted to quickly prototype some highly concurrent service, I'd probably use Go. If I wanted to engineer something that is incredibly scaleable and fault tolerant, I'd probably use Elixir.

The C-ish-syntax and procedural nature of Go is likely to give it more mindshare in the programming community, however, and that can't be ignored.

[bismark]

There definitely are jobs though :)

My company is currently looking for Elixir/Erlang devs to help us build a new decentralized communication platform. Based in London/SF.

If you or anyone is interested, please ping me at [e-mail].

[hackerboos]

I envision Erlang shops moving to Elixir.

[nox_]

Hah, yeah, let's port everything for no obvious reason.

[unoti]

There actually are good, obvious reasons to prefer Elixir to Erlang. Syntax is actually significant to productivity. For one quick example, Erlang requires you to terminate statements with either a comma, or a period, depending on whether it's the last statement in the section. If you move code around, you need to go back at the end and fix the commas and periods. Typically, this happens in the form of an error message, which leads to a tedious extra step that happens to me maybe 15 times a day when working with Erlang. That problem doesn't exist in Elixir. There are quite a few other nice things too. Elixir increases productivity in real ways.

[MetaCosm]

The syntax reason doesn't matter to existing Erlang developers -- you get used to the Erlang syntax, same as any other syntax.

The meta-programming on the other hand may well be a huge draw to Erlang shops.

[rmgraham]

Erlang and Elixir play very well together. I imagine Erlang shops "moving to Elixir" will be in the form of Erlang shops hiring people with Ruby experience and letting them use Elixir so they can get up to speed faster.

[dragonwriter]

I knew Ruby pretty well before trying Erlang and used Erlang before trying Elixir -- I still find Erlang easier to write in that Elixir.

Elixir is more visually similar to Ruby, sure, buts its substantively not very similar, so the visual similarity is, if anything, a detriment, IMO.

[coldtea]

Perhaps the problem is you used Erlang before trying Elixir.

For the typical programmer coming outside the Erlang/Elixir environment, Elixir is by far the more familiar and easier to pick up.

[nox_]

Syntax is the least of your worries when learning a new language. Elixir isn't Ruby. Some new projects may be developed in Elixir but it will never supplant Erlang.

[pessimizer]

>Some new projects may be developed in Elixir but it will never supplant Erlang.

I vastly prefer Erlang syntax to Elixir's, but IMO it's way too early in the game to say this. In the unlikely event that the people who were attracted to Elixir because they couldn't handle Erlang's syntax can manage to grasp OTP, I imagine that Elixir would ultimately kill Erlang dead. An Erlang that has the same power and expressiveness, runs on the same VM, and is completely compatible - but looks like Algol - would be an irresistible force.