Elixir Release v1.0.0

https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir/commit/52ff7e96867c027745d29f5d3feb77f546f22c4f

by lidashuang • 12 years ago

214 40 12 years ago

Well done, guys.

bilalhusain2• 12 years ago

For the uninitiated, there was a fairly positive critique[1] of Elixir by Joe Armstrong, the creator of Erlang, last year (at least that's what got me hooked to Elixir).

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

infinite8s• 12 years ago

That's a great read! Were the warts he pointed out ever addressed?

bilalhusain2• 12 years ago

I'll try to cover couple of them. Hopefully, others can fill in:

- funs have an extra dot in the name: not fixed because that will lead to inconsistency [1]

- send operator: removed earlier this year and the operator is reincarnated as comprehension operator (comprehension being more ubiquitous [2]); although, the proposed syntax wasn't adopted

Not sure about funs and def. It appears that not much was discussed about versions in source file and docstrings inside function definition (module doc is already inside); the later one can be dismissed being a common bikeshed in PL design.

So, yeah, most of the proposals couldn't make it because of complications.

[1] https://groups.google.com/d/topic/elixir-lang-core/_kEBXO0NR...

[2] http://elixir-lang.org/getting_started/18.html

johnzim• 12 years ago

Congratulations! Great job getting to 1.0!

The Erlang VM is a beautiful piece of engineering - anything that brings people into its orbit is good for programming.

samuell2• 12 years ago

For anyone wanting to know more about Elixir, all the videos from this year's ElixirConf are available on the web [1]. The opening keynote by Dave Thomas is an eye opening "must watch" [2].

[1] http://confreaks.com/events/elixirconf2014

[2] http://confreaks.com/videos/4119-elixirconf2014-opening-keyn...

jpgvm• 12 years ago

Awesome power and maturity of the Erlang VM + modern syntax and hygienic macros... such beauty.

felixgallo• 12 years ago

Jose Valim is a pretty incredible person. Ships top-tier code at a high level consistently, thinks thoughtfully and strategically, and engages with the world in such a calm and positive way. The BEAM ecosystem is richer for his presence.

purephase• 12 years ago

Agreed. Always pleasant to see his name attached to projects. Gives me reason to look into them further.

sanderjd• 12 years ago

I had the pleasure to chat with him for awhile after he gave an Elixir talk at a ruby conference a couple years ago. He is one of the friendliest and most humble people I've ever met, and his work speaks (very highly) for itself.

gcanti• 12 years ago

I am very happy, I can not wait to get my hands on

rdtsc• 12 years ago

Great work Valim, Eric and everyone else!

I was following their progress and there was a constant and steady stream of changes over the last years.

emiller829• 12 years ago

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• 12 years ago

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

hackerboos• 12 years ago

I envision Erlang shops moving to Elixir.

bismark• 12 years ago

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 ryan@spatch.co.

hderms2• 12 years ago

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.

tiffanyh• 12 years ago

In case you are wonder why the excitement about Exilir ... Exilir allows you to easily create DSL in Erlang.

Phoenix is a great example that has used Exilir to create a DSL that is similar to Ruby on Rails.

http://www.littlelines.com/blog/2014/07/08/elixir-vs-ruby-sh...

tieTYT• 12 years ago

Is it recommended that you learn Erlang before you learn Elixir, or can you jump straight into Elixir without Erlang knowledge?

rmgraham2• 12 years ago

You should be able to jump straight into Elixir. If anything, Elixir is probably a reasonable gateway into learning Erlang.

Disclaimer: I studied Erlang before Elixir, so I don't have a fresh perspective.

alco• 12 years ago

Erlang knowledge is not a requirement to start learning Elixir. You will end up learning about Erlang programming model anyway because Elixir builds on top of it.

By "programming model" I mean things like immutability, concurrency, fault-tolerance, and the way you design systems with OTP.

sandGorgon2• 12 years ago

A genuine non-flamebait question - if one were to write a Whatsapp-like messaging system today, would you use Erlang, Elixir,Scala,Java 8 or Go?

I'm kind of wondering whether Go is not already eating into Erlang (and Scala). I am not an expert, but I understand that Go is not at par with Erlang today, but I am wondering about a 3-year bet for a startup.

vertex-four• 12 years ago

I would definitely go for either Erlang/OTP or Scala+Akka. No other platform you mention has built-in support for clustering to the extent that OTP and Akka do.

samuell2• 12 years ago

Yeah. Go is good for multi-core, but does not provide anything in terms of multi-node distribution. Even Rob Pike admitted (at GopherCon this year) the language would need some fundamental changes to support that.

mhd• 12 years ago

As most people will tell you, it's not really all about the concurrency with Erlang, but more about the reliability that comes with the general programming model, the runtime and OTP. Compared to that, I'm not even willing to bet that within 3 years Go resolves their typesafety issues.

sh1ps• 12 years ago

I (personally) would bet on Elixir, particularly if the team writing it would be learning an alternative like Go anyway.

Go can try to reach parity with Erlang one day...but Elixir already is Erlang...That combined with the fact that Elixir's package management already feels light years ahead of Go's disaster and I think it's a winner. I'm sure I'm wrong and the flames of Go lovers will engulf me in the responses, so take this with a mountain of salt.

sandGorgon2• 12 years ago

Are you taking into account the recent efforts in the Go ecosystem to fix the pkg management issue [1]

I may be short sighted, but I seeing the ecosystem around Go to be much more ... accelerated than Erlang.

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7956078

findjashua• 12 years ago

From a technical standpoint, I'd say Elixir.

Advantages over Go:

1. Reliability (OTP, supervisor, pre-emptive scheduling)

2. Clean code (error handling, higher order functions)

3. Far superior package management

Advantages over Erlang:

1. Extensible (Macros)

2. Familiar syntax for Rails developers

That being said, Go definitely has the advantage when it comes to marketing/hype (Google, Unix daddy etc), which as you can judge by the success of Node and Mongo, sadly trumps technical merit even in the tech community.

careersuicide• 12 years ago

This release is doubly exciting for me because it means my copy of the Programming Elixir book should be shipping very soon!

I think I can very closely relate to Dave Thomas when he expressed his excitement about Elixir and how similar it was to what he felt when he first encountered Ruby. Early last summer I took a fairly deep dive into Elixir and discovered that it left me with the same feelings as when I started to explore Ruby at the suggestion of my then boss many years ago. It just made sense. From the structure of an application to the way pattern matching works and even the larger ecosystem. I know a lot of people compare Ruby and Elixir because of the superficial syntactical similarities but there's something deeper there that makes me almost giddy: once you know the basics a lot of the rest just sort of seems to fall into place. Unlike a lot of other languages the learning process isn't filled with head-tilting moments of confusion, just lots of nodding up and down while thinking "Of course that's how it works!"

knewter• 12 years ago

Required self-promotion: If you're interested, I have produced over 12 hours of content across 106+ videos around Elixir, at http://www.elixirsips.com

I started when I was first learning Elixir. Was already a pro with Ruby and had around 3 months of Erlang experience at the time. The first video was nearly my first experience with Elixir ever. Some of the more fun projects I've built with it have included synthesizers, API clients, and websites.

The release of 1.0 gives me goosebumps. José's done great work, and always does.

hderms2• 12 years ago

Elixir is an amazing language on top of a time-tested VM and incredible concurrency model. It's been a while since I've been so excited about a language.

It's an incredibly cohesive language that doesn't appear to have any serious flaws, as far as I can see. It's impressive that it's come so far along in such a short amount of time.

Elixir Release v1.0.0

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