The most enlightening experience I had from programming was picking up Elixir for Advent of Code[0] 3 years ago. At that point in my career, I <i>knew what I was doing</i> and had built various apps and systems. TypeScript and React was my safe-space, but which I often committed the sin of over engineering things to be as functional as possible in.<p>I'd tried Go, which I didn't really like because it was too imperative for my taste and also required you to write every... single... thing you needed from scratch. (Not trying to start a flame war here -- it's just how I felt using it).<p>One of my engineers was kind of obsessed with Elixir (he was / is extremely smart) and he convinced me to give it a go over Christmas break. It really was the functional Valhalla he had made it out to be. I felt like I'd finally found a language that "got" how I wanted to approach writing code. Unfortunately, startup life got in the way, and I was hardly going to suggest an Elixir rewrite (well, I did try, but anyway).<p>I'm planning on re-approaching Elixir, as a haven to write code as a human. I still use LLMs for writing code pretty much daily, but if you're looking for something that's different and fun, I would recommend checking it out. It's just a shame to hear that the author is, for now at least, stopping their engagement with the community due to how they perceive it's changing!<p>[0] - <a href="https://adventofcode.com/" rel="nofollow">https://adventofcode.com/</a>
It's probably the language that punches the furthest above it's weight in community size vs. what you can do with it (and what is being done with it professionally), and I don't think it's even close really. The quality and capability and breadth of libraries people publish is really incredible, from web all the way down to embedded.
What did you need to write with golang? I found the exact opposite effect when I tested elixir and then went to go.<p>Exlixir has a great std lib but fewer packages than I'd like in the community. I can't even recall what I wanted!<p>With go the std lib seems bigger (although very lacking in some data structures) but the third party packages are incredible.<p>I also find both languages similarly useful since I was mostly interested in sane concurrent primitives in a lang. The OTP is not that useful to me since I haven't had to run these services in anything close to serious but you can (kinda) take the OTP to other languages (they're principles after all).
> What did you need to write with golang?<p>This is a great follow-up that I don't have a satisfactory answer for, because I can't really recall. I _think_ I was trying to do something with Firebase w/ high parallelism using goroutines. I just remember the feeling of imperativeness when I was iterating through results, etc, and not having a built-in mapping function.<p>Elixir was totally different -- was just scratching an "intellectual" itch, and it fit my needs like a glove in terms of <i>feeling.</i><p>I'm confident that I could learn to like Go, though, lots of people I know rave about it.<p>> The OTP is not that useful to me<p>Also agree, didn't really get into OTP even, just enjoyed the style and structure of the language itself!
I have come to the same conclusion in my personal technical writing. I am loath to share ideas to the scraper marketplace just to have some executive prompt an LLM 2 years from now and claim the idea for themselves. I am weary of sharing my academic work with a chatbot as well.
This is very sad, but I came to the same conclusion with my math blogging a couple years back. There’s little point to publishing any personal effort on the internet anymore. At best you get some spam comments and your work stolen by bot scrapers; at worst you get a doxxed and targeted by a harassment campaign.
> discussion has collapsed<p>I used to be extremely active on Elixir Forum. It was the main place I would interact with people online, and HN was a bit of a distant second. Now HN usage has spiked a bit and I now have a... ugh... reddit account. There is still some decent discussion there, but it's largely library announcements (many vibe coded), some blog posts (that are often about AI), and news posts. Questions about the language itself have, unsurprisingly, pretty much completely halted. I think around a month ago someone asked a syntax question -- it was a bit of a jump scare!
Unfortunately, I share the sentiment. Although I have been blogging weekly for more than 15 years, I have less and less incentives to share my learnings.
> There even are in the elixir community a few people letting Claude borrow their name and profile picture while handling all interactions. I won’t name them here but I find this very unsettling. I don’t blame them directly<p>Why not name them? These are people who no longer want to communicate with other people. They should be named and shamed. All their fake-interactions they do via LLMs should be made obvious at all times. That way real humans can instantly avoid these clowns.
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