Lisp-Flavoured Erlang

by tosh • 8 years ago

122 57 8 years ago

mavdi• 8 years ago

I love this. But go ahead and have a look at the "Who's hiring" post and you'd be correct to think that investing in languages like Clojure does limit your career choices.

It's depressing I know. I will always write my personal projects in Clojure but it's a shame that I can't rely on it as the primary means of making a living.

moomin2• 8 years ago

I think it’s perfectly possible to have a career in Clojure in London. But, of course, I couldn’t advise anyone to move to the U.K. until the final state of Brexit is known.

agd2• 8 years ago

There are a tonne of Elixir jobs in London at the moment. It's a great city to live and work in.

jtr_47• 8 years ago

Don't choose a language because it will make you money. Choose language because it's something to learn and you'll enjoy programming in it. You can know more than 1 language. The main one is that which will earn you an income. The other, or others it to play and enjoy what the language and environment has too offer.

cutler6• 8 years ago

Even in London there are only a handful of Clojure jobs. Clojure growth has stagnated. Likewise with Elixir though Elixir has a better chance in the long run due to the community's support for Phoenix.

ramchip3• 8 years ago

After three years of trying to push for adoption, I’m also starting to find it depressing. I’ve talked with various people also looking to introduce Elixir or Clojure in my workplace (large company), and even when it’s a perfect fit for the problem, we invariably hit a wall because it’s not popular enough to be considered seriously. Anything not in the TIOBE top 10 or so might as well not exist.

didibus6• 8 years ago

It's easier to ask for forgiveness then for permission. Next time you get a project, just do it in Clojure or Elixir, don't ask.

The beauty of this is, if you are using the JVM, JavaScript or Erlang, it doesn't even have to be green field. You can just write a section of the code in it.

jacquesm• 8 years ago

It's pretty similar to how the best marketed software products will win out over the best software products.

notduncansmith• 8 years ago

I’ve used Clojure to complete coding challenges that ended in getting hired for full-stack engineering positions, twice. So it’s shown some value there.

Aside: If you let yourself get spoiled by Clojure’s efficient data structures and concise functions for manipulating them, it can be really frustrating to work in other languages that aren’t so data-oriented. It feels like it takes forever to “get to the point” when reading most traditional web application code.

On the other hand, if you have some flexibility with the program design, you can get many of the same benefits of Clojure in traditional languages by applying Clojure’s data-oriented architecture lessons (it feels almost as good as doing Clojure at work). Even frameworks like Ruby on Rails can be bent with minimal strain to fit the data-first paradigm; it does, however, require some departure from convention.

Finally, you can always use Clojure as a secret weapon at your own startup. One of the primary benefits of Clojure is the extreme simplicity of design, and conceptual compression you can achieve as a result. This allows small, even single-person, teams to build and manage an impressive degree of functionality with decent performance. Keep at it part-time, and you’ll grind out a solid MVP in a few weeks.

cutler6• 8 years ago

Clojure is my favourite language by far but the community's apathy towards web frameworks continues to do serious damage to its chances of widening adoption. There is Luminus but it's at best a curated list of libraries and the community refuses to throw its weight behind it. It's good as far as it goes but it will never compete with Rails or Django. There's a kind of smug pride in the Clojure world that "we don't do Rails", prefering instead to build everything from the ground up with libraries. Good luck with that one. Look at how few Clojure jobs there are at Indeed.com or Angle.io. Maybe, just maybe, this attitude might have something to do with it.

didibus6• 8 years ago

Every Java, JavaScript or Erlang shop is possibly a place where you could start using Clojure or Elixir though. But you'd need to champion it yourself.

pjmlp3• 8 years ago

Not necessarily.

Learning alternative languages opens our mind to architectures and approaches to solutions that we wouldn't though of when staying in a silo Developer X.

As for making a living in Clojure, there a couple of places in Europe using it, HN "Who's hiring" isn't the only source of job ads.

softbuilder3• 8 years ago

Every time I see these (LFE, Elixir, perhaps others) mentioned I feel sad that people don't seem to see the beauty in the Erlang language itself. Learning Erlang was a watershed moment for me and it had little to do with the actor model or OTP.

That should not be meant to take away from these other projects that do interesting things. It just seems like people needlessly avoid Erlang because it's unfamiliar and they miss something amazing in the process.

whitepoplar2• 8 years ago

I love Elixir, and I've played around with Erlang, but only very briefly. What made learning Erlang a watershed moment for you apart from the actor model and OTP? What do you think are the most elegant parts of Erlang?

softbuilder3• 8 years ago

'Elegant' is probably not a word I would choose, although it may apply at times. Erlang was the first place I saw pattern matching and is also how I came to actually understand list comprehensions, although I'd seen them elsewhere. There were other little things. And I liked the syntax! I don't think it was any one thing though. It was more the way things worked together, and worked much differently than other languages I had worked with. At that point I had been a programmer for 10 years and felt kind of jaded. Everything seemed fundamentally the same. I was even surprised now not-weird Lisp was when I finally got around to it. It seemed like once you get to a certain place with programming you think you basically have it all worked out and everything becomes implementations details. And then something comes along and shakes that understanding. It's that shake that I was grateful for. It was a personal experience. Others have probably had that with Haskell, etc.. I hope everyone gets to have that now and then.

brightball• 8 years ago

I love the runtime and don’t have anything against Erlang, but the coding experience of Elixir really won me over.

It’s not a dislike of Erlang as much as it is a joy of Elixir situation.

fenollp• 8 years ago

IMO Erlang needs Elixir’s `|>` and `with` pipes. I voiced my opinion on the ML and kind of started working on it! I need https://bugs.erlang.org/plugins/servlet/mobile#issue/ERL-639 fixed first.

I find Erlang a harder tool to shoot yourself with than Elixir yet there are definitely some things it could improve on, and not only at the language level (always running xref on compilation would be nice).

i_feel_great• 8 years ago

I find Erlang a harder tool to shoot yourself with than Elixir

Can you please elaborate? I was of the opinion it was the other way around.

dnautics2• 8 years ago

the pipes are worth it for the IO.inspect pattern alone.

For those who are not familiar, in Elixir you can write

    result = value
    |> f1()
    |> f2()

and that is equvalent to

    result = f2(f1(value))

IO.inspect is a function that will fork a copy of its passed parameter to stdout, pretty-printed, and pass its parameter as the sole result.

so if you wanted to check on on the values you can do this:

    result = value
    |> IO.inspect(label: "value")
    |> f1()
    |> IO.inspect(label: "result-of-f1")
    |> f2()
    |> IO.inspect(label: "result-of-f2")

This makes "println debugging" super, super, easy, because post facto cleanup doesn't require rebalancing your parentheses.

jchassoul2• 8 years ago

Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon!

sitkack• 8 years ago

Welp, I am pretty sure the creator of LFE "gets" Erlang, as it is Robert Virding [1]

Pattern matching and immutability are pretty sweet aren't they? So is homoiconicity and macros.

[1] https://github.com/rvirding

softbuilder3• 8 years ago

Welp, I am pretty sure the creator of LFE "gets" Erlang

Did I suggest otherwise?

rs86• 8 years ago

I really like Erlang but Elixir has the protocol feature for polymorphism that is really useful.

Personally I like the Erlang syntax better but most colleagues find it weird.

debacle• 8 years ago

Erlang is a very ugly language with brutalist, esoteric syntax. If Erlang adopted a C-like syntax (like nearly every other successfuly language in the world) it would see much wider adoption.

nonsince• 8 years ago

C is a very difficult-to-parse language for both humans and computers and its syntax family got popular as much from circumstance as anything else. JavaScript stole Java syntax to court Jaca developers, Java stole C++ syntax to court C++ programmers, C++ stole C syntax to court C programmers and now you have most of the biggest languages of the past 20 years using C syntax because C got big back in the day (and it didn’t get big because of its syntax).

Modern C-family/Algol-family syntax is nice but I certainly welcome trying out other syntax families (in the case of Erlang, Prolog-family).

pjmlp3• 8 years ago

Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder.

jarcane• 8 years ago

Jamming C syntax into everything is how we get eyesores like ReasonML.

A syntax should match the semantics of the language. C style is not the only way to design a programming language and does not fit all domains and semantics.

maze-le• 8 years ago

Brainfuck is esoteric, C++ Template Metaprogramming is pretty esoteric. But once you wrap your head around the pattern matching, the erlang syntax becomes pretty straight forward. I found it interesting because it explicitly didn't look like a C-derivative. The only thing that I think can be a bit cumbersome are specs and types.

alexeiz• 8 years ago

Erlang syntax indeed seems a little strange. But it's only because today we are accustomed to languages with much more usable/friendly syntax. But when Erlang was born in the 80's the usability wasn't much of a concern yet for programming language designers. Compare popular languages born in the 80's such as C++, Perl, Tcl with the languages born in the 90's such as Python, Ruby, Lua, Haskell. There is a clear pattern. Later languages are much easier to read and write.

pjmlp3• 8 years ago

Same here, but then again I was a big Prolog fan during university.

So Erlang syntax feels natural, I just don't have any use for it on my line of work.

rvirding3• 8 years ago

I am a big fan of Prolog and concurrent logic languages as well.

rvirding3• 8 years ago

Well, I do of course see the beauty of the Erlang language; it is a simple, concise and consistent syntax. However, I also like Lisp being an old lisper. Lisp was actually the first high-level language I learnt. So LFE is an attempt to get the best out of Erlang and Lisp, at the same time.

didibus6• 8 years ago

Clojerl, Clojure on the Beam, is also one to watch: https://github.com/clojerl/clojerl

cutler6• 8 years ago

Yes. Definitely. A much better Lisp option for the BEAM than LFE.

arunix• 8 years ago

Why is it better than LFE?

rvirding3• 8 years ago

I am not really a fan of clojure and I much prefer the Erlang concurrency model to the options that clojure gives you. I don't agree with Rich Hickey here. And I prefer classic lisp syntax to clojure syntax.

But clojerl does give you the chance to run on a better VM so in that respect it is good. ;-)

fouc• 8 years ago

Could someone please invent Forth-Flavoured Elixir?

Lisp-Flavoured Erlang

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