Elixir-lang.org has a new design

A “fan” of erlang definitely gives me vibes if the 3-4 people at conferences who used to debate about Erlang and Haskell and all these things in very academic ways and enjoyed it.

And that’s awesome. We need people like that. But the vast majority of people want to get stuff done, and I have always admired that Jose Valim seems to be one of those people that just “gets” the mix of good technology with its PRACTICAL use rather than just debating programming languages endlessly.

Without elixir, outside of a handful of companies implementing it in their core systems, erlang probably would’ve mostly remained in the domain of the same guys at conferences that passionately debated tabs vs spaces or BDD vs TDD. In fact, I think that’s exactly where Haskell is. I barely hear about it, just like I used to barely hear about erlang.

The rest of us that focus on what we’re building with the technology or the dev UX, etc, would’ve stuck to ruby and other things, if not for elixir.

I say this as someone who has been writing elixir full time since early 2016 and absolutely love the beam. And I’ve yet to edit my first erlang file. It just hasn’t mattered in most of my real world use.

Joe Armstrong, one of the creators of erlang: "Dave loves Elixir, I think it's pretty cool, I think we're going to have fun together."

Although I'm late to the pile-on and all the good takes have grown old and gotten replies, I cannot let this grave insult against my people go unanswered.

Elixir, if anything, really excels at communicating the intentions of the (occasionally esoteric) architectural demands that the Erlang originally fortified decades ago, often encountered when using OTP. This, alongside that tower of respected Elixir tooling, adhering to Erlang's norms which, once past "mere" interoperability within BEAM, is still supremely important when e.x. minimizing laborious/unusual syntax requirements when using Elixir modules from 'naive' Erlang code. This is part of a more wide-reaching feeling, one of common concerns being important to address in Elixir (and Erlang) for the health of the franchise, not just as grist for the mill of an ancient FP hyperwar, each warring cybergang being willing to die for their preferred juridical interpretation of a bug report.

I don't think this is true.

The history of Elixir has its roots in Jose learning Erlang, loving the properties BEAM, but wanting a different language.

All of the principles of the BEAM still exist in Elixir. And a lot of the Elixir semantics come from Erlang, precisely because Jose studied Erlang and the BEAM.

It's nonsense. The people who made Elixir understand Erlang and the BEAM as well as anyone on earth. Elixir and Erlang have different syntax but aren't even that semantically different. Contrast this with say, Java and Clojure. Clojure is significantly different than Java both in terms of what idiomatic code is, as well as how the average developer understands and uses their tools day-to-day. (Obviously they both run on the same VM, the JVM, which is why this comparison works.)

Elixir has some semantic "userspace"-level differences from Erlang (Elixir has protocols, macros, defaults to strings as binaries rather than strings as charlists, among other things) but they are much more similar than they are different. Both are on BEAM, both expression-based languages, both use processes for concurrency, have immutable data, use pattern matching for control flow, rely heavily on OTP, deploy with releases, share (or build on) the same datastructures, have the same performance characteristics, etc. If you know Elixir you pretty much already know Erlang modulo the time it takes to learn Erlang's syntax.

Absurd statement. If you omit surface-level syntax, there's very little that's "in the style of Ruby" in terms of actual semantics.

elixir also has hygenic macros ala scheme. it also easier to write and read day to day compared to erlang. elixir also made strings more manageable.

they made a bunch of tangible improvements

Elixir, the language, is still basically Erlang with some niceties. The main Ruby influences are the syntax, which I don't love but can't say I hate, macros, which Erlang doesn't have, and large web-frameworks like Phoenix.

Elixir is a wonderful language and one of my favorite languages.

> Elixir was made by people who don't really understand Erlang

And this is definitely not true.

Hi Jose

You’re an inspiration for many. Thank you.

I’m curious to know what your top 3 hopes for BEAM itself are for the coming years (in any area that you think would make it better).

A few years ago, I was working on an interpreter implemented in elixir for a domain specific language. It was a pretty basic metacircular interpreter. It relied heavily on function signature dispatch. When I tried breaking up the massive “interpret” function across modules, performance tanked. I got it all back by using some macro shenanigans, but understandably the team did not like this.

Knowing what I know now, I would’ve tried to push for a threaded interpreter to get rid of the runtime overhead of dispatching altogether. I don’t know if they’ve changed the architecture of that module much since I left :-)

It's a JIT nowadays. Admittedly an extremely simple one, to minimize compile times and maintenance overhead.

You can get substantial performance improvements by using guards though. See what Wings3D does with is_float() everywhere in hot numeric-heavy code.

i ran a quick experiment where instead of doing boxing the way its done in the beam currently, i used a different boxing (NaN strategy and there was a 10x speedup

Java and Javascript run times do really well at that.

I actually experimented with using it as a backend for a multiplayer turn based game.

I eventually gave up because it’s a bit too difficult without a team.

It's a good joke but most of my applications are I/O bound. So I use Elixir for performance.

Why not use Java, C#, or Swift in that case?

as a SWE this is not a good sign. it means the job market is slowly transitioning into temp work like economics. The value I got out of the Elixir contractors was immense since it not only proved that we can get a huge bulk of the work done without specialists and use them on demand for audit for a few months before AI this would've been not been possible.

normal market dynamics suggest scarcity demand premiums but this is not the case with software developers it seems.

both contracts have over 10 years of experience with Elixir and one of them have written a widely used library. I think you are tad out of touch with the job market and with where agentic coding is right now.

Designs can't be easily split into a pure light or dark mode, though. Before light/dark modes were popularized, it was common to have some parts be "dark" and other parts be "light," depending on the design (for example, would the iOS 5 game center be "dark mode"?). Elixir's website uses a mix of light and dark to delineate sections.

One consequence of software recently supporting light and dark schemes is that UI designs end up committing to all white or all dark, rather than tastefully choosing a color scheme that best frames its content in context.

Why would it be at odds with accessibility? The text contrast is excellent in each section, and the light/dark segments clearly define the border between sections. Forced dark mode can be difficult to read for users with astigmatism, but the font size is large, and the actual documentation sites[0] do have a light/dark switch.

[0]: https://elixir.hexdocs.pm/1.20.2/

i along with 99% of people don’t mind it

I don't think Machine Learning falls under what most people consider "AI" and "LLM" these days, even if they're technically intertwined.

It was not: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48959936

It certainly looks like a Claude design to some extent; not all they way however.

It feels less sloppy than most obviously AI generated landing pages.

The only sloppy aspects that stand out to me are the needless animations/transitions.

I tried it, and it brings little. It got new syntax, but syntax alone is not important. I can build with erlang, so why would i pick elixir? I used erlang for almost 20 years, and never saw the idea of elixir.

Gleam on the other hand has a actual type system. It still young but i can see what it offers.

So syntax for me is totally pointless and just noise.

Yes. It feel unergonomic and bolted on. I rather have a pure static type system, or a full dynamic language.

discord is also unsuitable for real world use

Dont use discord, never have. It could be just as easily be built in vanilla. Its just a chat really. Nothing special.

They had a recent re-design last week.