
Elixir v1.0.0 released - petercooper
http://elixir-lang.org/blog/2014/09/18/elixir-v1-0-0-released/
======
mjackson
I'm constantly impressed by the level of execution of the Elixir project. In
~3 years they have accomplished much more than many other language ecosystems
have to date.

It's great to see the core maintainers understand that you need MUCH more than
just a compiler, runtime, and std lib to create a truly vibrant ecosystem. The
Elixir project includes a standard way to do templating, a powerful and robust
shell, a very full-featured unit testing library (not just assert statements),
a standard logging system (this is sooo often overlooked), and, to top it all
off, a build system that also lets you manage dependencies!

I honestly can't name any other ecosystem where you can just jump in and all
these problems are already solved for you by the core project maintainers,
instead of by 3rd parties competing for mindshare. It's truly refreshing
because it gives the community a common language and toolchain to work with
and get stuff done.

Hats off to everyone involved! You guys continue to amaze me.

~~~
derengel
Don't know or have plans to use Elixir for now since I have always seen the
Erlang VM as tackling only the problem domain of requiring high fault
tolerance and distributed computing systems but no so much for general purpose
programming as languages like ruby/python/js/clojure etc. For example: how may
programmers are writing systems like Riak, Amazon's SimpleDB, CouchDB,
RabbitMQ every day?

That said, from reading the article you forgot to mention Hex, the package
manager.

~~~
klibertp
Whether you - as a programmer writing them - realize it or not, many complex
web apps would benefit greatly from Erlang concurrency, distributed computing
and fault tolerance support. Every time I'm forced to use Celery or
multiprocessing or a cronjob - and that happens quite often in nontrivial
projects - I wish I worked with Erlang.

I learned to love Erlang some time ago and its various quirks are mostly
invisible to me, as I generally know them well and am working around them
reflexively. However, I recognize that for people who don't know Erlang yet,
Elixir provides a much easier path to obtaining full power of Erlang VM and
ecosystem. It can also benefit more experienced erlangers, as it improves some
Erlang features and then adds some totally new ones.

Elixir is a language which makes Erlang better suited to high-level, glue-like
scripting purposes, while still providing full access to things Erlang does
exceptionally well. In a way it's an effort to make Erlang reach outside of
its specific niche by making many things traditionally hard or unpopular in
Erlang easy to do in Elixir.

In short, if you're a serious programmer who works on anything that has a
server or is related to network in some way (which includes all web apps, most
mobile apps backends, all IM software, many different services like Dropbox
and many more) - you owe it to yourself to try Elixir out. Now that the
"awkward syntax" and many (admittedly) irritating quirks of Erlang are gone
and you're left with just the good parts you have really no reason not to
learn and use it.

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linguafranca
Elixir reminds me a lot of Clojure.

\- It's a language that sits on top of another language's bytecode (Erlang vs
JVM)

\- It has its own task runner and dependency manager (mix vs lein)

\- It has homoiconicity and macros!

\- One of its main features is amazing concurrency support.

But Elixir has been in development for a much shorter time than Clojure. Yet
it's approaching the same level of maturity of Clojure very quickly.

I'm eager to see where is Elixir is adopted. I hope to see it gain some
traction in the web development world.

~~~
TylerE
I though Elixir was not a whole new compiler, more like
coffeescript:javascript than clojure:java.

~~~
untothebreach
No, it is not like coffeescript:javascript. Coffeescript compiles to
javascript source code, which is then turned into bytecode by the VM. Elixir
is _NOT_ compiled to Erlang source code; rather, it is compiled directly to
BEAM bytecode.

So the clojure:java comparison is accurate.

~~~
andyl
Elixir also gives you really cool meta-programming tools, a way to extend the
language, that aren't part of CoffeeScript.

~~~
untothebreach
I can't say for sure, but I don't think it would be impossible to add that
kind of capability to coffeescript, but you are right that right now
coffeescript can't do that

~~~
klibertp
Some people tried IIRC but they never got very far. One reason could be that
syntactic abstraction is generally not in great demand, but could be something
else entirely. Also, take a look at Sweet.js

------
prezjordan
What have you built with Elixir, HN?

~~~
wut42
I'm writing (professionally) a backend for the "internet of things".

~~~
polskibus
Wow! I had the same idea not so long ago. Are you by any chance targetting
Bluetooth Low Energy connectivity? If so, can you share a bit on how are you
going to interface BLE with Elixir? If not, what kind of IoT connectivity are
you targetting ?

~~~
wut42
Actually i'm not targetting any specific kind of devices — the core server is
extensible, you add your own sources (tcp, udp, whatever) and your
encoder/decoder. The original scope of the project was GPS beacons.

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hderms
Elixir is the #1 language I want to succeed. I can't imagine how amazing it
would be if web development counted Elixir among its top 5 languages.

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knewter
Congratulations to everyone involved! I have all of 7 commits in, all trivial,
but huge thanks to everyone in the committer list! It's amazing.

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clynamen
I looked at erlang for a while and I really liked it, even if I never used it.
Now I'd like to learn Elixir. However,I ask myself why should one prefers
Elixir over scala+akka

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rdtsc
Congratulations Valim, Eric and everyone else. Great work.

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adefa
Wonder why the release announcement came days after it was available through
homebrew?

~~~
rubiquity
The language creator and maintainers wanted to give package maintainers time
to update their package dependencies to Elixir 1.0.

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lectrick
I have JUST finished Dave Thomas' excellent (beta) book, "Programming Elixir,"
and honestly I can't wait to start building great concurrent, network-aware
processes with it!

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nodivbyzero
Who is the biggest customer of Elixir?

~~~
alco
Open source community.

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cIynamen
I looked at Erlang for a while and I liked it. Now I want to learn Elixir.
However I ask myself why one should prefer it over Scala+Akka

~~~
logicchains
For one, Erlang has much better latency, as it has process-local garbage
collection. In Akka, if the gc has to do a major collection then all threads
must be paused.

