Elixir lang 1.10.0-rc0

https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir/releases/tag/v1.10.0-rc.0

by bluehatbrit • 7 years ago

234 102 7 years ago

Hard to believe this wasn't a feature already, but I love that they added it.

    DateTime.now!/2

dudul• 7 years ago

So far, I've been totally unimpressed with Date/Time support in Elixir. `DateTime` wasn't even part of the API until 1.9.0!

andy_ppp2• 7 years ago

That's why most people use a third party library. For me it's fine for most things, what were you doing? An example of such a library I've used is https://github.com/bitwalker/timex which seems quite complete.

dugmartin• 7 years ago

I built an event ticketing site a couple of years ago in Elixir/Phoenix and it has been rock solid since the initial release. The only painful thing during development was datetime storage and math - I used a third party library (I’m not at my development machine so I don’t know which one it was).

losvedir• 7 years ago

I'm actually really happy with it now. At work we used Timex for all the datetime/timezone stuff because, as you say, it wasn't available in earlier versions of Elixir.

However, since 1.9 it's quite good, IMO. I ripped out Timex from most of the code because it's a beast of a library and not especially well documented, relying on just TzData for the TimeZone database. It's great to rely on just the standard library again because it's up to Elixir's usual standards of documentation and stability.

out_of_protocol• 7 years ago

DateTime is added in 1.3.0:

https://hexdocs.pm/elixir/1.3.0/DateTime.html

andy_ppp2• 7 years ago

DateTime.now! is the same as DateTime.now which existed forever but will throw an exception if it fails rather than return an error tuple. It's good they added it, but not a problem before.

whalesalad• 7 years ago

I've been having a lot of fun writing an API for a ublox GPS chip with Elixir. Glad to see continued development of this wonderful language.

gamache• 7 years ago

Great job to the whole core team! There's a bunch of awesome stuff in here, but I think the one that's going to steal the most hearts is:

    Enum.sort(my_list, :asc)
    Enum.sort(my_list, :desc)

That rounds off a sharp corner of a very common part of the language.

elcritch6• 7 years ago

That and DateTime sorting using the module api. That’s much nicer! One of the few "oh what the..." bugs I’ve had in Elixir was not realizing that sort defaults to structural sorting. Also it helped make sense why all the Erlang datetime primitives are tules that’s structurally sort correctly.

jswny3• 7 years ago

My personal favorite part of this release is the enhanced diffing in assertions! Now if a pattern match assertion fails in a unit test ExUnit will pretty print the both items in the comparing and color highlight the differences!

ExUnit is a pleasure to work with and one of the best unit testing frameworks I've ever used.

lawik6• 7 years ago

Oh dear, yes! I missed that in the release notes but I'd heard it was coming. I want it. I wanted it today.

conradfr4• 7 years ago

Another news, Nubank buys Plataformatec (José Valim's company).

http://blog.plataformatec.com.br/2020/01/important-informati...

jswny3• 7 years ago

Most importantly Elixir and their other open source projects are being transferred over to community control and will not be affected by this acquisition.

  For the Elixir programming language in particular, José Valim and the Elixir Core Team will continue developing and maintaining the programming language in the same capacity as they have been doing over the last few years, independently from Plataformatec and Nubank. We are in touch with the Elixir Core Team to transfer all assets, including the existing trademarks and the Elixir website, to their control.

andjd• 7 years ago

The way this reads, it sounds like Nubank isn't going to keep supporting these open source projects by letting their employees spend company time on them... I hope that doesn't starve elixir of resources.

jaynetics3• 7 years ago

Mobile-readable version of that quote:

For the Elixir programming language in particular, José Valim and the Elixir Core Team will continue developing and maintaining the programming language in the same capacity as they have been doing over the last few years, independently from Plataformatec and Nubank. We are in touch with the Elixir Core Team to transfer all assets, including the existing trademarks and the Elixir website, to their control.

brenden2• 7 years ago

Interesting, but seems a bit odd that a bank would acquire a software consultancy firm though. I wonder what they plan to do with it?

bluegene2• 7 years ago

My guess is Plataformatec did consulting work for Nubank and they are aquihiring purely for talent

jswny3• 7 years ago

It's more like a fintech start-up trying to build a banking system that was heavily into functional program from what I could glean.

lawik6• 7 years ago

Seems like it was a straight up acqui-hire. They were happy with the dev-work, processes and stuff they got from hiring them originally and wanted all of it. Or that was my take-away from reading it at least.

elamje• 7 years ago

For those that don’t know Nubank, they are a Brazilian app/bank/credit card that is the biggest (by employee count) core user of Clojure. They use Clojure and Datomic database for their core products.

Not sure how they are using Elixir, but you can find more about their use of Clojure and Datomic on YouTube. They sponsor/speak at a lot of Clojure conferences.

dmix2• 7 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nubank

Sounds like a great business.

zabana2• 7 years ago

For the elixir programmers who are going to read this: do you use it professionally ? If so, for what purpose ?

I'm interested in learning this language but I don't really know what can be built with it ? It is a general purpose language or a more specialised one ?

Thanks for your input

di4na2• 7 years ago

General purpose for anything that is long-running. I mean more than a few seconds.

In my case, we use it to power web api, backend systems, databases, IOT devices. Anything that is not a "cli" thing basically. It is not the best for desktop GUI app because it lacks a deep framework for that, but it works well with it if you can make past that hump.

It is not good at: - smartphone app. That is mostly due to the walled garden that these devices are - CLI tools - Systems engineering - on the fly scripting - That basically is it

hew3• 7 years ago

We're using it for "data-intensive realtime" (ish) apps at the moment.

DIRT (h/t Bryan Cantrill? http://dtrace.org/resources/bmc/DIRT.pdf)

I hope to expand it to other more mundane CRUD-y microservices in the future just for the low maintenance, productivity, easy grokkability it offers.

minhajuddin4• 7 years ago

I used to program professionally in Elixir where we talked to a ton of external providers. So, our app was heavy on the network (http) and Elixir was a really good fit for it. Now, I use it on personal projects.

zabana2• 7 years ago

This is great !

Are your personal projects web related ? (I'm trying to draw as broad a picture as I possibly can )

bluegene2• 7 years ago

I've been using Elixir for personal projects for the last 2 years; The syntax is refreshing coming from C#/Java world. I learnt so much while learning to program in Elixir especially Pattern matching, functional programming and Actor-model concurrency. Highly recommended

jamesvl• 7 years ago

I've been using it professionally for a little over two years as well. At a basic level, it's doing basic API / CRUD pages but, combined with the Phoenix framework, it feels like my time is much more effective (maybe 10% boilerplate, 90% business logic).

On a more advanced level, it also drives websocket communication for our web app, making two-way communication both simple and fast. We also take advantage of its multi-process facilities to drive long running tasks (cron jobs, long-running HTTP requests to slow services, data batching and analysis...) all within the same tool.

It's paid dividends distilling what would otherwise be a complex setup of various tools, each with their own communication interfaces and failure modes, into one simpler system.

Elixir is not "general purpose" like C, Python, or Rust might be, but it doesn't pretend to be. But for writing maintainable, robust, distributed and fault-tolerant systems that do networking, I love it.

HalcyonicStorm• 7 years ago

We use it at our company for our inventory system. We make hundreds of concurrent http requests per minute and parse json and soap responses that are up to 8 MB in size. We're a tiny team, so while its possible to accomplish this in many tech stacks, functional programming, pattern matching, immutable variables and other Elixir/Erlang features make it easy to release a stable product quickly. This project has been in production for 2.5 years and has been working beautifully.

pselbert• 7 years ago

I use it professionally about 90% of the time, and for my own projects almost 100% of the time now. I’ve been in the community for about 6 years and still absolutely love it.

samgranieri• 7 years ago

I've used it professionally for three years in the govtech/payment processing space. It's absolutely wonderful

lawik6• 7 years ago

If you want, you can write scripts in it. Just like Python, but that isn't the sweet spot. It is much more suitable for long-running things.

But Nerves is a cool project for Elixir + embedded Linux.

Scenic is a neat project for OpenGL UIs in Elixir.

It can do a lot of different things. You can pick it for the concurrency, the durability or the distributed nature of it. Tons of potential applications. So general purpose-ish. But not as general as some others.

lawik6• 7 years ago

Oh, and the Lumen project is looking to get it to compile to WebAssembly rather than run on a VM which seems like it will also provide a more lightweight way of running it. That both adds a new use-case and potentially improves the places where it can be suitable.

pmontra3• 7 years ago

2.5 years, a Phoenix webapp. It's the backend of a marketplace for invoices. The frontend is a React SPA. It interfaces a number of third party JSON and SOAP APIs. It's still well within the limits of a medium low server on GCP. No need for fancier environments.

Coming from Rails I like that I don't have to go through separate job handlers, everything we need is in the language. I don't like much ecto (too complicated for our need.) I dislike the configuration, build and deployment process (it's definitely not snappy). By the way, it's great that Phoenix autodetects changes and recompiles them without the need of an IDE.

Compared to another Django project I've been working on in parallel, the Elixir one feels more robust and easier to expand upon. Compared to Rails ones, it's about the same but with less third party libraries.

nickjj3• 7 years ago

What I found interesting is the author of Phoenix said in a podcast[0] that most of the apps he deploys don't use releases. They just run things inside of a Docker container using mix straight up.

[0] https://soundcloud.com/elixirtalk/episode-157-feat-chris-mcc...

desmondmonster• 7 years ago

I've been using Elixir professionally for the last ~5 years on over a dozen projects.

I was originally drawn to it because of its superior support for websockets. It can trivially handle shitzillions* of simultaneous connections and thus make fully realtime, dynamic web applications within reach of small teams of developers. Other languages _can_ do this, but with much more complexity and cost to host and develop.

Currently I'm working on a fintech API that doesn't use websockets :). Elixir is a great choice because its syntax is the perfect balance of being expressive but not dense. I find that describing a solution in my head translates almost perfectly to a series of functions. It's my go-to language for any task outside of scripting.

I'd compare the experience of using Elixir to drinking a glass of lemonade on a warm summer day. Everything seems to happen very easily.

* technical term

rhizome31• 7 years ago

I developed 2 simple web APIs. Built-in caching and background processes simplified development and deployment. The server just needs PostgreSQL and the application release, which is a self-contained deployable artifact. No need for redis, cron or celery...

Now as a team we're developing a more involved application allowing to schedule jobs and services dynamically.

Background processing and real-time updates are among the typical use cases for Elixir/Phoenix.

princevegeta892• 7 years ago

Elixir has always been a pleasure for me to work with. Maybe true with most FP languages as well.

The main positive I see is that I can easily navigate through code (due to absence of complex objects/classes) and the standard library seems to be very extensive.

The language was also easy to get into. My only complaint is that the IDE support for intelliJ(through the plugin) hasn't been impressive though I can live with it.

AlecSchueler• 7 years ago

Could you, or anyone else, recommend some well written and idiomatic elixir code that's free to browse through?

Coming from an object oriented background the idea that classless code could be less complex is sorta blowing my mind!

minhajuddin4• 7 years ago

Check out hex: https://github.com/hexpm/hexpm

toast02• 7 years ago

For me, the benefit vs OO is that everything is explicit. If I'm calling into a function from another module, it's almost always clear which other module -- if I need to see what it does, I can go look and the code is likely to be there. Compared to something in OO where I've got an object to call a method on, and it may actually be an object that extends/implements making it much harder to find code (IDEs can often help, if you've taken the time to setup the IDE).

You can call into a module with a variable, but it's rarely done, outside of some specific types of code interaction (ex: structural event loop processing like gen_server takes a Module to callback into).

Of course, when sending messages to processes, there's not really anything in code to indicate where those will be processed, and I don't know that IDEs help there either. Usually, code organization helps, but it's not required.

Caveat: my experience is with Erlang, not Elixir, but should generally apply.

hew3• 7 years ago

Plug for this book when stepping beyond syntax (I'm just a satisfied reader):

https://pragprog.com/book/jgotp/designing-elixir-systems-wit...

It was hugely helpful to me in wrapping my head around something bigger than hello world.

lawik6• 7 years ago

I've found most Elixir projects I've taken a look at to be surprisingly easy to follow when I've needed to.

I've dug into Ecto, Ecto SQL, Elixir itself at times. This was just because I was trying to figure out some corner-case behavior. The overhead of understanding someone else's classes when I tried similar things in Python was always just a much heavier mental load. Idiomatic or not.

As mentioned by another comment, the important thing is that each function you need to read can pretty much be read on its own. You might need to follow a few trails. But the way a library can hide where the magical state comes from in a Python class is sometimes maddening. I know, because I've written that code.

I find Elixir incredibly readable, nicely writable and the mental overhead continuously lower.

di4na2• 7 years ago

changelog.com opensourced their whole website

https://github.com/thechangelog/changelog.com

lliamander2• 7 years ago

I felt the same way going from Java to Erlang.

One hurdle that was difficult for me was understanding Behaviors (which are an abstraction used in both Erlang and Elixir). On the one hand, a Behavior is much like an class/object: it has public methods, internal state, polymorphism (via message passing) and to some extent a notion of inheritance. According to Alan Kay, it's more Object-Oriented than Smalltalk!

However, a Behavior runs in it's own process. Like a typical class, public and private functions are defined in the same file This makes reading the code where a Behavior is defined more difficult because the public methods are executing in the client process, but the callbacks (i.e. private functions) are executing in the Behavior's own process.

One insight I gained from working with Erlang was that the "academic" notion of OOP modeling (i.e. model the entities of your domain as discrete objects) works much better with Erlang's proceses/Behaviors than it ever did with classes/objects in languages like Java.

Objects in languages like Java, C#, Ruby, JS, etc. are much at modeling the architectural components of a system, than at actually modeling domain entities directly. That's actually partly why I really the Pony language: it combines both objects as processes (called Actors) and objects as components/capabilities (called Objects).

rubyn00bie3• 7 years ago

Oh yeah, friend, here are a few packages:

Mint (HTTP client library) - https://github.com/elixir-mint/mint

Jason (JSON library) - https://github.com/michalmuskala/jason

Tesla (Another HTTP library) - https://github.com/teamon/tesla

---

Yeah, the thing that has driven me to FP, and made Elixir/Erlang such a joy is that data and state are like not coupled (not saying they have to be in OOP, but god damn if I haven't had something that should only do a read do a write and fuck me too many times to count). Given the same input a function will always produce the same output, because values are constant. I've been writing Elixir for like 5-6 years now and four of them professionally, and I hope I never go back to a non FP language (save Rust or mind-boggling pay).

It's kind of mind blowing when you realize, at any point in your program, you can simply serialize out your data, inspect it. Try that with a class, good fucking luck with whatever marshaling system you have...

In Elixir/Erlang, all you (generally speaking) ever have are:

- Strings (binaries, bit-strings, charlists)

- Numbers (integer, float)

- Lists (a list of things)

- Maps (a set of keys and values)

- Structs (a map with a predetermined set of keys)

Recursion and pattern matching make for more readable code IMHO. Here's a fairly trivial snippet from the other day, of converting structs to maps (which Elixir doesn't do implicitly): https://gist.github.com/tehprofessor/fd8aebeb4804201a49f37d9...

The biggest thing to keep in mind coming to a BEAM language from somewhere else is that both the language you're using (Elixir/Erlang/LFE[1]/etc) and the runtime were explicitly designed together to solve a specific category problem (distributed systems). This very unique combination provides, IMHO, the best environment you could ever want to run code in...

In most languages you start up your server in its own process. Want to debug it? You gotta restart the process and then put your debug point in. Not the case in Erlang/Elixir, here's how I start up the Phoenix framework:

iex -S mix phx.server

What that does is both (a) starts the server, (b) opens up an interactive repl for the running application. You can then interact with the running system as it is, and holy shit does it make debugging wonderful.

Want a fast cache for that one operation but don't want to setup X, Y, or Z? Use ETS it's built in: https://elixir-lang.org/getting-started/mix-otp/ets.html

I can't tell you how much frustration I've saved just having reliable mechanisms for timing (thanks pre-emptive scheduling) like `Process.send_after` https://hexdocs.pm/elixir/Process.html#send_after/4

Need to make sure you're only sending messages to live nodes? `pg2` (process groups to the rescue): https://erlang.org/doc/man/pg2.html

Something in Erlang just too slow, write a NIF (but really don't; this (NIF) is a last resort and the only way to you're likely to ever actually crash the VM). You can see a VERY simple example I have in the `wyhash_ex` directory: https://github.com/tehprofessor/shorts (please note shorts is just a toy project, and not quite complete as I got obsessed with the `gen_tcp` part).

Finally, while yes processes, are the fucking peanut butter, jam, and jelly-- you really don't end up using them directly that often in your day to day life. If they aren't making a ton of sense or you don't find yourself using them everywhere, don't sweat it-- when you need to they'll be the obvious solution (even if implementing that solution isn't obvious at first b'cuz learnings).

If you have any Elixir questions, I'm available on Twitter at the same handle as my Github links. Also, the Elixir slack is quite great as well.

[1] LFE is List Flavoured Erlang

Edit: Fixing formatting. God damn I suck at this.

sjtgraham• 7 years ago

The Elixir source code itself.

maltalex• 7 years ago

Could someone with professional experience int Elixir give an overview of what's the ecosystem like?

It's hard to imagine working with such a niche language. How easy is it to find quality libraries? Connectors to external systems? Tooling? Someone to ask when running into problems?

Also, what's the market like for Elixir developers? Did you learn the language on the job? For a specific project? In your spare time?

minhajuddin4• 7 years ago

The Elixir ecosystem is really healthy. You can find almost any package you want on hex (https://hex.pm/). Moreover, because it is built on top of erlang you can seamlessly use any Erlang code (which a lot of Elixir apps use).

You can usually find high-quality libraries with a google search or looking at the number of stars of a hex package. Mix, the build tool is awesome and the language now has out of the box support for creating deployment releases.

There are a lot of high paying jobs for Elixir.

verttii4• 7 years ago

It really depends where you're coming from. If you're from the enterprise world I'd expect you'll find the ecosystem limited for anything else than web related, maybe even for enterprise web integrations. If you're coming from something even more niche (for web) like Haskell you'll think the ecosystem is flourishing.

Libraries are generally of good quality and reasonably well documented. The community is very energetic and supportive. Moreover, there's an exceptional range of libraries and solutions available for certain problem domains in which the Erlang platform excels such as distributed concurrency and soft real-time applications in general.

If the problems you work on fall outside of the web sphere Elixir is not a good fit generally.

elcritch6• 7 years ago

I can’t agree about the "just web dev" part. After using Elixir extensively in embedded devices it’s been fantastic. Some libraries are lacking, especially scientific. Still I find the time implementing say, polynomial curve fitting, to be more than compensated for by the robustness of the architecture and avoiding the quagmire of OOP code. It’s actually kind of fun to me using Elixir/BEAM for data processing.

hew3• 7 years ago

Learned on the job. Previous professional background PHP, JS. Beginner to what I think to be competent ("full stack", a range between infra and clustered prod deployments to page layouts in Phoenix LiveView) in about four months.

I've been able to find high quality Elixir packages without trouble. I haven't had to fall back to Erlang packages for any holes but I feel confident because I could.

techacolyte42• 7 years ago

I use Elixir about 30% of my time at work. I feel like 75% of my code/architectural sense comes from studying how the Elixir community does things - the quality of discussion in the forums and issue trackers is amazing and generally packages feel quite comprehensible. It's a breath of fresh air and clarity after React Native and Rails - there are a lot more resources for those two, but I find myself doing a lot more digging through noise.

Learned on the job, I get a little recruiter email about Elixir specifically but there are definitely less companies that use it. There's reasonable chance I'll end up in Go or Clojure for my next position but even if I were to never use Elixir again the learning will have been worth it.

AlchemistCamp• 7 years ago

Did you learn the language on the job? For a specific project? In your spare time?

I moved my last startup to Elixir due to some pretty harsh constraints:

1) I was a the sole developer of a complex app

2) It involved real-time chat and WebRTC

3) Most of its users were in SE Asia and it was a freemium model

This meant I needed a highly productive framework and neither Rails or Laravel were great choices from a technical perspective or in terms of server costs. Phoenix Presence was also a major bonus since there are so many edge cases around (chat room) presence that are easy to mess up when users have multiple devices. That specific need pushed me to learn the language, and it was such a great experience that I made it my go-to for all web development.

How easy is it to find quality libraries?

I've been very pleased with the quality of the libraries. Elixir tends to draw more experienced developers and I don't see as much "resume-driven Github" behavior, though of course some is inevitable. There's also usually a clear choice of library to use for a given goal, which is a huge plus over the JS ecosystem.

There are a lot of useful libraries out there in the Rails and Laravel ecosystems that I wish existed for Elixir, though. Probably the most frustrating thing on the libraries side is the lack of first-party libraries from companies such as Stripe. Many company's API docs generally assume the user is pulling in their first-party Ruby/PHP/Java/JS/Python/etc library and Elixir usually doesn't make the list.

Tooling?

The tooling was a big step up from what I was used to! Zero complaints there, except a few minor ones if you're running on Windows.

Someone to ask when running into problems?

I've had hit and miss experiences with the Slack channel, but the forum is pretty much the best Q/A experience I've ever had for technical issues.

Also, what's the market like for Elixir developers?

It used to be easy to hire them since there were a lot of people who wanted to use it and not so many companies hiring for it. Now, it seems a bit more balanced.

dobs2• 7 years ago

I feel like my experiences are in sharp contrast to many others here.

I love Elixir the language but find myself still having to throughly review new libraries to avoid footguns. In particular with "connectors" -- DB drivers, API clients, basic protocol implementations, etc. And resolving those issues normally means fixing them ourselves, often with a significant refactor to someone else's library. And in turn that's meant some of us having to become fairly proficient with Erlang.

So while I'm optimistic about the future of Elixir there are still some pain points that I think relate directly to the immaturity of the community.

verttii4• 7 years ago

I actually have a similar experience. This is basically due to having no type system, at least the problems we've encountered.

elcritch6• 7 years ago

Are many of these issues related more to older Erlang libraries? Most all of the Elixir libraries that aren’t a WIP have been pretty good for me. Just curious which sort of protocols too. Not always, but I do find older Erlang libraries often lack unit testing and consistent doc tooling, likely due to lack of tooling in earlier days.

conradfr4• 7 years ago

As someone casually looking for Elixir opportunities in Paris, France my observation is that there's not a lot of them (expected), and usually come with a RoR requirement (expected as well, I guess).

Also it seems some companies rewrite their Elixir services in Go?

jaynetics3• 7 years ago

I've made the same observation in Berlin. Not a lot of job offers, and those that exist are more like "yeah, we're also trying out a bit of Elixir in our stack...". Such a shame.

lawik6• 7 years ago

A few years back I wanted to try it for a microservice but found it didn't integrate with our system because of missing features in the ZeroMQ libs of the time. So there are and were corners where things aren't fully fleshed out. I imagine you can find these odd corners in most ecosystems.

I've been happy with the libraries I've found and used in general. All the common web stuff seems to be there. ExAws solves most of the cloud integration I've dealt with. But I don't imagine I'd find a selection of high-level, highly ergonomic Google Sheets libraries the way you would in Python. Not yet.

I'd say its still early days but healthy for the job market. I've found freelance work with an Elixir shop recently which is fun. But it is nowhere near Python, JS and all. Still, plenty of people making a living as employees or long-term contractors doing it. And it seems to be growing at a steady rate. I'm hopeful.

Learned it out of interest. Tracked down my current client through the Elixir Slack actually.

aloukissas• 7 years ago

The "Tracking of compile-time configuration" part definitely stands out here for me. We've been dealing with this using private module functions but this new language approach is cleaner.

nickjj3• 7 years ago

If anyone is wondering who is running Elixir and Phoenix (Elixir's primary web framework) in production I started a podcast recently where I talked to some folks about this.

That's at: https://runninginproduction.com/tags/phoenix

Episodes range from using it in closed source private internal apps in the medical industry to open source apps dealing with billions of events per month on a single server.

Hopefully others will be willing to share more stories in the future. There's a few more episodes going up in the next couple of weeks for Phoenix specifically.

Elixir lang 1.10.0-rc0

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