Why would I choose Elixir as a general purpose programming language?

[OvermindDL1]

@rvirding

Unless of course you use LFE, Lisp Flavoured Erlang, which is not imperative and behaves like Erlang and Elixir.

Lol, true, I was speaking more of the common CLISP and Scheme implementations. ^.^

LFE is awesome, I highly recommend everyone to play with it.

@vonH

I find it annoying that nearly every single cool new programming language does not interface to GUIs very well, Elixir and Erlang included. You can look up every new language and Github such as Wren or Lily and they all don’t interface to GUIs well. It seems that ever since the web came into being language developers have ignored the GUI aspect of their usage. So what I want to do is to create some kind of library which can analyze a language, and generate bindings to C based libraries.

GUI’s is a hard problem, QT is near the de-facto for native interfaces now, and HTML for the web. I would not see why Elixir would have a direct interface regardless, it is design to be used on headless servers.

Also, there is ElixirScript, which is new but works, it lets you write javascript inside elixir as elixir code, which then gets sent as javascript out.

@peerreynders

Elm is easier than Haskell for becoming more familiar with functional programming but it makes certain tradeoffs that makes some people switch to PureScript for production apps - for the enhanced power which comes at the cost of a steeper learning curve. And lets not forget about BuckleScript (OCaml again).

Yep, Elm is a fairly pure ML language, it is not like Haskell or OCaml, it is very limited, no higher typing of any sort, it is designed to be quick safe and fast to make simple HTML javascript programs, and it works well at that.

Bucklescsript is OCaml compiling to javascript, it is utterly fantastic, entirely safe and powerful, but it is a newer layer so is still getting libraries on it. My own Bucklescript-tea library adds a near identical to elm interface for writing web programs if you like that style like I do.

@gon782

TL;DR: Working on the BEAM is the only reasonable way to handle concurrency and building big systems that may or may not have to be spread out over several nodes, so gluing things together with the BEAM is really the only reasonable way to work at the moment. That’s what these languages are for. They’re not really better in any other way.

You can ‘do’ about anything in any language, but this is the awesome part of Elixir/Erlang/LFE/etc.., they run on the EVM/BEAM, which is unmatched by anything else.

You would not even necessarily ‘need’ to use Elixir either (other than it has a host of awesome libraries that are easier to use in it, but not necessary to use in it), any EVM/BEAM language would work.

@vonH

Can Elixir and Erlang be programmed in pure functonal style?

The both already are. Any language that compiles straight to the EVM/BEAM must be because the EVM/BEAM must be.

@vonH

What features of Elixir do I have to avoid if I am to keep it as close to the functional ideal as it is capable of?

Not much really, the Process Dictionary is probably the most un-functional-like thing but no one really uses that anyway…