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Comment by manusachi | Hacker News Reader

Agree!

For that very reason in Elixir `import` is discouraged in favor of `alias`

I enjoy Elixir but this situation is quite unfortunate, there is alias, import require and use for referencing / pulling in code external to a file in some way or another, plus the possibility of calling a function from another module directly by name without an import statement using the module name – and the most annoying part of it is that none of these give an indication of which file the other module is from, which is like 50% of the utility of an import statement for me.

Instead there is this pattern of naming modules based on the file path they are located in, which is not enforced.

Doesn't Elixir (and Erlang for that matter) specifically require a module to not be in a specific place in order to have hot reloading of modules? Though I suppose you could still have hot reloading and require a module to be in a specific place.

Not sure, could be that Elixir stuck close to Erlang's module system yeah.

But for example gleam [1] is another language on the BEAM (compiles to Erlang), that has a much nicer approach: All imports must be declared explicitly, and the import path in your local project is based on the file structure so you always know where something is imported from [2].

[1] https://gleam.run/

[2] https://tour.gleam.run/basics/modules/

Nope. Elixir doesn't care where your module lives. (You can even "nest" modules, though it's not a great practice)

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