Found in 2 comments on Hacker News
sivers · 2015-06-29 · Original thread
Hopefully some day! ☺

All my programming is public, so if I ever start making something with it, it'll be at https://github.com/sivers

But I'm a fan of OpenBSD, and like to make sure it stays current. I've contributed a few thousand $ over the years to help.

And I'm a fan of Dave Thomas from Pragmatic Programmers, so when I heard him raving about Elixir, I had to give it a try. I like it so far.

Good overview video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hht9s6nAAx8

Good books:

"Introducing Elixir - Getting Started in Functional Programming"

http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920030584.do

"Elixir in Action"

http://www.manning.com/juric/

"Programming Elixir"

https://pragprog.com/book/elixir/programming-elixir

klibertp · 2015-02-25 · Original thread
Of course LYSE (http://learnyousomeerlang.com/) and then "OTP in Action" after you know the basics. But!

There are at least two languages that work on Erlang VM and offer alternative syntax. There's Lisp Flavoured Erlang (http://lfe.io/) and Elixir (http://elixir-lang.org/). Elixir, in addition to syntax, improves on some aspects of Erlang which make newcomers uncomfortable, adds more powerful metaprogramming utilities and adds modern features like browsing the docs from REPL. I found "Introducing Elixir" (http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920030584.do) rather good as a starting point and you can do quite a lot with it. But, in the end, you have to at least know how to read Erlang docs, because Elixir won't (and doesn't even try to) cover all of Erlang libraries with friendly wrappers.

Personally I'm used to Erlang syntax, which is small and consistent and I like the "explicit is the only way, no implicit things ever" language philosophy of Erlang, but Elixir is a fine language to learn and use. There's a web framework called Phoenix which despite being very young is already better (subjectively) than pure Erlang frameworks.

I used Erlang twice professionally: for writing a kind of reverse HTTP proxy with caching and for writing a backend for web app using WebSockets. It performed very, very well and was quite pleasant to write. Both things are running non-stop for over a year now and never crashed and were not restarted even once, despite being changed significantly in the meantime (that's just an anecdote, of course).

Erlang is a bit odd and has much smaller community than Python. Lack of libraries may be a problem. I'd never use Erlang for something I'd use Django. I would consider using it for things I'd otherwise use Flask, but probably wouldn't chose it in the end. But it's my "go to" tool for situations where I'd use Twisted/Tornado or gevent now.

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