Why Elixir is the next Great Tech
Contents
Elixir, because:
I think of Elixir as an idea whose time has come; or rather, a great gathering of ideas.
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Erlang has solved the problem of distributed computing (and therefore, of concurrency) decades ago, and now concurrency is a very desirable tool, as the amount of data we crunch regularly has increased exponentially.
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TDD has brought a more functional approach to a lot code, and that is the paradigm Elixir espouses.
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Elixir takes all of the syntax niceness from Ruby, so it's pretty and easy to read.
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Elixir makes OTP incredibly convenient to use, which means that one is able to create and communicate with processes with concise and expressive code.
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Elixir's Phoenix Framework makes both stateless (traditional request/response) and stateful (anything from long-polling to websockets) connections very simple to use, by providing powerful abstractions based on OTP. The code remains readable.
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The websocket connections are easy to set up and easy to scale, maintaining a single state via the socket: a tempting idea for folks using the Flux architecture in the front-end.
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Elixir's Phoenix Framework takes from all the lessons of Rails and Javascript of the past decade and has created a testable, maintainable, and extendable web MVC framework that in reality, is just another OTP application.
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As we depend more and more on external services (API, either internal or external), fault tolerance becomes top-of-mind when building robust systems. This is another problem Erlang solved years ago through supervisors and managing how to handle failures.
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Elixir/OTP allows for incredible uptime by letting you write code in such a way you can actually do hot reloading.
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Elixir is one of the few non-lisp languages to implement real macros. This allows you to create your own domain language in your code should you need it.
As we move more towards microservices, and given that a microservice is the unit of thought in Elixir (an OTP app is just a service that can receive messages, send messages, and hold state), it will become a de-facto choice, because it is a superior abstraction to the existing options.
Elixir and Phoenix are the new present. Bow to our new tech stack overlord.
Author Aldric Giacomoni
LastMod 2016-03-31