[rlander]

> Elixir just did it better imo and this person seemingly can't stand that people seem to like it more.

The post does read more like venting than a structured critique, but a few of his points are still valid.

Every time I hear someone praising Elixir, it's never about some Elixir-specific feature but usually about something that Erlang has provided for ages like pattern matching, lightweight processes, supervisors, the preemptive scheduler. Given this, I'm sure you can appreciate how bittersweet this can be for an Erlang developer.

To me Elixir is just a more complex, verbose and less elegant version of Erlang so it kinda frustrates me when newcomers would rather learn Elixir than plain Erlang.

[dnautics]

Elixir code out there is much cleaner than erlang code bases. In terms of organization, picking names. And there's much more dedication to testing and documentation. I think these software habits are very important for newcomers, and so if you are truly dedicated to the craft of software you probably should want them to learn Elixir even if the language is 25% more cumbersome in the small. There is something about the terseness of erlang that I think carries over to a mentality of not writing tests and not documenting. It doesn't help that it is less of a part of the culture (probably since it's an older language, Elixir is a post-"software-testing-revolution" language; Erlang is a pre-testing-revolution language).

[rlander]

> Elixir code out there is much cleaner than erlang code bases.

You do understand this is just your subjective opinion and not a universal truth, right?

You are basing your argument as if it was a fact that Elixir is “cleaner” (whatever that means) and that there was a thing called “software-testing-revolution” which Erlang was never a part of. Both are subjective and, frankly, plain BS.

> if you are truly dedicated to the craft of software you probably should want them to learn Elixir

Oh boy, I don’t even know where to start... so you’re basically implying that Erlang programmers are not “truly dedicated to the craft of software”? It would be laughable if it wasn’t just sad.

This is the Ruby world mentality that just rubs me the wrong way. Not even worth carrying on with the discussion.

[ianbutler]

I legitimately could not get passed the choice of syntax, module organization etc. I believe many people feel the same way. Verbosity is good imo, languages are read more than written and Erlang is too terse for me. I love Erlang conceptually and I love that Elixir made it accessible to me because I otherwise would have just avoided the Erlang ecosystem all together and would have gone with Go, the thought of which makes me shudder because I am not a fan there. I can completely understand it being bittersweet and not that I knowingly represent a majority but I suspect many people think the same way I do in regards to writing in Erlang. To me terse != elegant and I find Elixir goes the mile for me there in what I do find elegant.

[pmontra]

It's curious how these matters can be subjective. It's Erlang the verbose one for me: the commas at the end of the lines. Of course Elixir has all those do/end and commas in the with statement (I wish it was part of the language and not a macro). Maybe I was just too happy to do without the trailing ; when I moved to Ruby and Python from C and Java.