drinking the elixir - yow! conferences · elixir is what would happen if erlang, clojure, and ruby...

Drinking the Elixir@jocranford

Why Elixir?

Concurrency Support

Accessibility

Performance

Impact on hiring

🤔 But why not just write Erlang?

Elixir =

Erlang libraries + Elixir tools

Elixir

Erlang

Prolog sucks ass for building entire applications. But that hasn't deterred Erlang from stealing it's

dynamite syntax.

Damien Katz, creator of Couch DB

Despite some great properties, I never was (and I’m still not) quite comfortable programming in Erlang. The coding experience somehow never felt very fluent, and the

resulting code was always burdened with excessive boilerplate and duplication.

Saša Jurić, author of Elixir in Action

!= +

Our Journey.

Doing concurrency in Erlang or Elixir versus other languages is a bit like doing branches in Git vs Subversion.

Devin Torres, Nano Core Team

OTP

OhteepeeOTP

Ohteepee

Concurrent Systems Platform

OTP

Supervisor

Supervisor

Worker Worker Worker

Worker WorkerWorker

Monolith Ruby on Rails

Unicorn

Worker Worker

Worker Worker

A little story about workers dying quietly.

What we learned

sasl logging library is excellent

Workers that die gracefully are not restarted

What we learned

sasl logging library is excellent

Workers that die gracefully are not restarted

Expect the unexpected

Be prepared for some frustration

Accessibility

class Greeter def hello(name) puts "Hello, #{name}" end end

Greeter.new.hello("Jo")

defmodule Greeter do def hello(name) do IO.puts "Hello, #{name}" end end

Greeter.hello("Jo")

Elixir looks familiar

Map Hash

List Array

sort of like

sort of like

Atom Symbolequivalent of

Enum similar interface to Enum

Stream similar interface to Stream

The Paradigm Shift

When we fell in love with Elixir

The Pipe Operator

|>

def index(conn, _params) do status = MicroStatus.version(Waffle.Status)

send_resp( put_resp_content_type( conn,("application/json"), :ok, status ) ) end

With no Pipe Operator

def index(conn, _params) do status = MicroStatus.version(Waffle.Status)

conn |> put_resp_content_type("application/json") |> send_resp(:ok, status) end

With the Pipe

Pattern Matching

x = 1

If {:ok, contents} = File.read("file.txt") IO.puts contents end

def max([head | []]) do head end

def max([head | tail]) do _max(head, max(tail)) end

defp _max(one, two) when one > two do one end

defp _max(one, two) when two > one do two end

Fewer nil checks

Fewer if statements

Eliminate early returns

Shorter functions

Much tidier code!

Even for single threaded programming, mutability brings an uncertainty about how a program will execute. And I do not miss the

mutability at all. Functional programming and immutability helps to clarify things and makes it easier to reason about code.

Lau Taarnskov, Tech Blogger

Mix

IEx

Logger

ExUnit

Elixir is what would happen if Erlang, Clojure, and Ruby somehow had a baby and it wasn’t an

accident.

Devin Torres, Tech Blogger

Immature is a word boring people use to describe fun people.

Will Ferrell

Thanks!