Hacker News Reader

Of course you're right, but I think anyone who is capable of getting their head around Elixir is capable of understanding that this is a trivial example meant to showcase a powerful language feature. What you choose to use it for is up to you, not the article's author.

View on HN

I see that point, but it was pretty jarring reading this Elixir article as a curious outsider that they had to make these kinds of very advanced contortions to do something so simple in such a non-performant way. It’s something that is only impressive if you were already totally sold in on the BEAM way of doing things, but looks insane to any C/C++/Rust/Java/whatever developer.

Processes are a core fundamental concept in Elixir - I wouldn't call them advanced. But they certainly have been shoved to the background for a lot of developers due to things like the Phoenix framework where you might not have to make your own.

You can just as easily swap out the “increment a counter” with “remove a random letter from a string” or “recalculate the hash” or anything else if it helps.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com