Hacker News Reader

Comment by ardemchenkov | Hacker News Reader

Sorry, I'm not a person to whom this question was addressed. But in our company we had 3 developers coming from PHP and Python world. They learned basics in 1-2 days and started to commit in production repository. Then in 1-3 weeks they learned it much deeper. But in our case it was easier because we already had high traffic and there were a lot of production examples to learn.

View on HN

Do they ever have to use an Erlang lib and find the documentation harder because they're Elixir programmers?

I love the Elixir syntax but worry it'd be like Scala: a better way for people who already know Java, rather than a way to use BEAM / OTP etc for people used to modern languages.

Most of my time I write Python, but I'm trying to spend more time with Elixir, and I haven't found using Erlang libs that hard.

There are a handful of rules to remember, if that, and it's reasonably straight-forward. module:func becomes :module.func, the erlang func probably wants char lists rather than strings, atoms are lower-case and should be changed to :atom, vars are upper case and should probably be lowered.

Learning the Elixir language is easy, thinking functionally less so (for me at least).

I don't remember that it was harder actually. We were using Mochiweb (was replaced by Cowboy at some point in time), Chicago Boss and some other additional Erlang libs and people switched from it to Elixir and other way around.

Agree with rossj, there're some rules to remember and then it's not that hard.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com