Is Erlang an albatross to Elixir adoption?
by srevenant on Hacker News.
I pose this question in all seriousness. An observation: after being an elixir developer for a few years now, and bringing new talent into the mix (no pun intended), is that it’s a friction point for new devs learning Elixir when they invariably stumble across the things in erlang — libraries and the like. I’d hoped I could avoid it myself, but it’s too interdependent. The notion that to learn a language you also need to learn a second one is not great. Imagine people saying “cool, learn python, but oh, you also should brush up on cobol while you are at it, you know.” It’s just bizarre. And before the vocal defenders kick in I want to clarify that the following response (which is what I usually hear) is NOT a valid response to the question being posed: “Erlang is easy, it’s just semantics that are different” While this statement might be true, it doesn’t address my point. That something is easy to do for one person is irrelevant to the fact it causes friction for new devs and may hinder adoption. I think there are many amazing points to Elixir, and thanks to Erlang it has a lot of amazing roots.
I know both communities are trying to make both co-exist well. But every time I come across an Erlang library, invariably the documentation is a nightmare (if it exists at all) and I have to read the code just to figure something out. This is true also of many system level things even in Erlang. The docs are horrific. Reading the code is NOT an answer. I don’t know what a solution is, but perhaps a concerted effort to create a documentation and library ecosystem that never links back to Erlang would help. And where there are critical systems that use an Erlang library, perhaps rebuilding it in Elixir is in order? Flame away 🙂 I ask the question because I’m curious how others feel about it, and I want to help promote more adoption of Elixir. (And hearing from ALL sides, not just defenders of the faith. What about people who’ve tried elixir and moved on?)