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Comment by josep2 | Hacker News Reader

I tried Elixir about 2 months ago for a project and found the standard library was lacking and the quality of community contributed modules wasn't up to par with other languages. I've worked with Python and Node my career and I prefer the Multi-paradigm approach of a Language like Go or Rust than the functional approach. I'll probably give it a try again in a year when it's more mature.

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What do you think the standard library is lacking? I mostly wrote Ruby before picking up Elixir and Ruby's standard library is loaded with mostly garbage. I've found Elixir's std lib to be focused to the core purposes of the language but I would love to hear what you think it needs.

I'm curious what you found lacking; I've been using Elixir for personal stuff for a year now, and every time I've thought what you said, I've gone to Erlang and found an OTP module that either covers, or goes far beyond my use case. José's said that they deliberately kept the stdlib small for this reason, that unless there was a pressing need to wrap the underlying Erlang libs, they would be excluded from the Elixir stdlib

For a minor example, recently I was building a representation of a rectangular tiled game board, and after fighting with the stdlib and lists for a while, found I could just, out-of-the-box and with a bare minimum of effort, build a directed graph, with built in pathfinding and access.

What you get for free is phenomenal

I love Bitstring Syntax in Elixir and Erlang. Similar feature is coming for Rust[1].

[1] https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/issues/346

This may be a perennial issue with functional langs, but using a functional lang only made sense to me after working with OO problems for YEARS.

You'll see quite a few people commenting in this thread (including me) who have spent something like 10-15+ years working with OO languages, we've seen the ugly sides of mutability, dependency spaghetti, holding onto state too tightly, too much coupling between classes, and the like; not to mention the difficulty with concurrency in a world where anything can mutate global state (such as class definitions).

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