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Comment by kuon | Hacker News Reader

That is why I love elixir, the power of erlang with a better syntax. Of course elixir is not perfect, but it is really good at making erlang better.

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Elixir doesn't have a better syntax than Erlang, it has a syntax that you can relate to and a syntax that makes sense to you. The first time I encountered Erlang I said Meh! After doing serious development in Prolog for a year, Erlang clicked! The first version of Erlang was implemented in Prolog and retained Prolog's syntax. There's reason behind the madness. As I mentioned in my other comment, "," and ";" signify OR and AND. One of the great thing about OR and AND is that they can be greatly parallelized. We haven't seen the last of Prolog & Erlang. With multicores being a thing, the language of the future is going to look more like them. The last serious research I saw done on these where in the 90's. So that annoying syntax is going to allow programs to gain performance advantage with more cores without being rewritten. The only thing that needs to change will be the run time. BEAM for Erlang and WAM for prolog.

I should have been more precise. I'd say elixir makes erlang more accessible and easier to work with, not "better" as they are two different beasts with two different focus.

So you recommend learning Erlang by spending a year on Prolog? :)

Elixir's syntax is inconsistent mess compared to Erlang.

An opinionated take: https://medium.com/@dmitriid/in-which-i-complain-about-elixi...

I would amplify this by pointing out that Elixir was not even a gleam in anybody's eye when Damien wrote this criticism.

That said, I would say most everything that Damien says here and is not already labeled as fixed remains an issue as written. Erlang is an exceeding conservative language community, from its telecommunications heritage, and its syntax has hardly budged from when it was first written.

I wonder if they're less likely to change now that Elixir is a thing. The community won't push on them to change as hard, as the community will move to Elixir. However, they still benefit greatly from the Elixir community as seen by OTP 20 and OTP 21 bringing great benefits from the Elixir community leaders.

> as the community will move to Elixir

I’m skeptical. It seems more likely a new, larger community will form (probably has formed) but I think anyone sufficiently dedicated to have used such an obscure, weird language prior will stick with it.

(I may be projecting a bit, but as someone passionate about Erlang I have minimal interest in Elixir.)

Elixir has a very regular syntax, so you get Erlang plus the power of lisp-style macros, which is HUGE. It also adds features like Clojure-style protocols. And then with pattern matching, we get to dispatch on all the function call arguments, like CLOS. So basically, it's got much of the power of Lisp, in a mainstream syntax. I love it.

With those syntax improvements, we get the power of Erlang with the ease of use of Rails: http://www.littlelines.com/blog/2014/07/08/elixir-vs-ruby-sh... (A bit dated, but this is the post that sold me on the platform.)

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