Simple Elixir web page - use Phoenix or not?

[OvermindDL1]

@vonH

Would it be right to say that functional programming is like an algebra exercise where you don’t have to compute the result but simply derive the formula that would compute the result, but only give the result in numbers if the exercise asks for it?

That is quite accurate actually, yes.

@vonH

That would mean that lazy/delayed evaluation is what might considered to be the normal thing and that Erlang or Elixir’s immediate evaluation when a function is applied is simply a means of speeding things up?

Precisely that. Haskell, in comparison, is entirely lazy/delayed, but it has a lot of optimization passes (which makes for a very slow compiler, like C++ kind of slow) to work around it, but it makes for a fairly blazing fast language if done well. Although OCaml is like Haskell except immediate (if you want lazy you have to decorate it yourself, which I prefer), and it compiles massive projects even faster than Elixir compiles Elixir (much faster actually), yet is fully typed and makes code within a single order of magnitude of C/C++ speed.

If you want to learn functional programming ‘as it is meant to be’, I recommend Haskell. For getting non-EVM/BEAM oriented work done, I prefer OCaml. But the EVM/BEAM and what it excels at is unmatched by anything else, especially web work.