Elixir Design Goals

I just started playing with Elixir this weekend, and it was a ton of fun. Ruby syntax + macros + Erlang semantics + UTF-8 strings is a great combination. And the <i>Programming Elixir</i> book from Pragmatic Press was a good introduction, too.<p>But I especially enjoyed Erlang&#x27;s concurrency model and OTP. In a few hours, I was able to go from basic message passing, to a simple OTP server, to distributed processes communicating between multiple VMs, and finally to a supervised OTP server with automatic restart on crash. Erlang provides an awful lot out of the box, and Elixir makes it quite friendly-looking.<p>However, it&#x27;s not a mature environment yet. The tools are pretty good for a young language, but the ecosystem is still small. Nonetheless, there&#x27;s some cool stuff out there already:<p>Experimental web framework: <a href="https://github.com/elixir-lang/dynamo" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;elixir-lang&#x2F;dynamo</a> Mnesia distributed DB wrapper: <a href="https://github.com/meh/amnesia" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;meh&#x2F;amnesia</a> Heroku buildpack: <a href="https://github.com/goshakkk/heroku-buildpack-elixir" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;goshakkk&#x2F;heroku-buildpack-elixir</a><p>I&#x27;ll need to build a larger system in Elixir, but the my initial impressions are good.

Oh man, I love BEAM VM&#x27;s design. Just looking at memory allocators, handling iolists, binary blob referencing, schedulers spread over all the CPUs, async IO threads. Just discovering that I found myself nodding my heading often say &quot;aha, that&#x27;s a really good way to do it&quot;.<p>It is good to see Elixir work on it alongside Erlang. I don&#x27;t think everyone will jump ship to Elixir. For example I like Erlang&#x27;s syntax (I might be in the minority) but meta-programming and ease of access to BEAM for newcomers is great.

Having been a bit of an &#x27;Erlang is quite good enough&#x27; purist, I am becoming increasingly tempted to give Elixir a whirl.<p>I am a long term hater of Javascript (global state, aargh!) and I have been giving coffeescript a whirl (no global state, yay!).<p>One of the (unexpected) side effects is that I appreciate the readability of coffeescript vs javascript much more than I expected.<p>Jose Valim is also giving a talk at a conference I am organising next month (<a href="http://mostlyfunctional.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;mostlyfunctional.com</a>), so I am tilting heavily at the moment...

I couldn&#x27;t be more excited about elixir, personally. All the power of erlang plus metaprogramming. To me elixir is the spiritual heir to Ruby

To be honest, I got very interested in Elixir myself. However, as I am trying to learn any Lisp, I am surprised LFE (Lisp for Erlang) or Joxa has not taken off, as the one thing missing from a lot of Lisp and Scheme languages seems to be a thread-based concurrency, specifically for multi-core processors having become ubiquitous.

I&#x27;ve spent the past few weeks writing quite a bit of Elixir, and I have to say that I haven&#x27;t had this much fun with a programming language in a long time.

Finished writing my first elixir library a few days ago <a href="https://github.com/rramsden/scribe" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;rramsden&#x2F;scribe</a><p>The language source code is incredibly clean and well documented. It&#x27;s been a joy to work with so far.

I&#x27;d love to know what James Hague (<a href="http://prog21.dadgum.com/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;prog21.dadgum.com&#x2F;</a>) thinks of Elixir. Erlang is one of his stronger languages, and he&#x27;s written a lot of articles in the past that I really enjoy.