Cellane

Cellane

Been asked to do a presentation about Elixir - what should I include?

I’ve been asked by my supervisors at work to finally give everyone in the team presentation about “that Elixir thing you can’t seem to shut up about” (:rofl:) so I’m busy preparing slides that would hopefully present a good pitch as to why FP and Elixir is a good idea. I’d be happy to hear about past talks and presentations from other people that I could use as inspiration!

Most Liked

dimitarvp

dimitarvp

Make VERY SURE to outline the runtime’s benefits:

  • Preemptive scheduling (what 99% of the runtimes out there don’t have)
  • OTP’s let it crash and get restored way of work
  • Supervisors!
  • Extremely easy to achieve parallelism and concurrency

Most people just fangirl at the language and a lot of other people are very rightfully not impressed. This decision is only 5-10% about the languages (say because of meta-programming / macros and good libraries). 90-95% of the benefit is the runtime so do your very best to highlight that!

dimitarvp

dimitarvp

Preemptive scheduling

Not one single OTP Process (what in other programming languages are called actors, green threads, fibers) can affect the latency of the others. The average execution time of any given function should remain mostly the same even under heavy load – a huge selling point IMO. That’s why Phoenix apps on $5 worth of servers can handle 2000+ requests a second (while a Ruby on Rails or Laravel vanilla app can be brought to its knees by 100-200 requests a second).

Parallelism / concurrency

Consider this:

def send_email_batch(list_of_emails) do
  # This will receive no more than 100 email addresses
  YourMailSender.send_batch_message(list_of_emails)
end

list_of_emails # Supposedly a very big list
|> Stream.chunk(100)
|> Task.async_stream(&send_email_batch/1, timeout: :infinity, max_concurrency: 20)
|> Stream.run()

:point_up: This will get a big list of emails, break the list into smaller lists of 100 emails each and send each chunk (batch) in parallel, but it never sends more than 20 batches at the same time (the :max_concurrency option of Task.async_stream), e.g. at any given time maximum of 2000 emails are being sent (if we assume this is your email sending provider’s API rate limit and that you want to comply with it).

This extremely transparent parallelism / concurrency is what brought me to Elixir.

AstonJ

AstonJ

Some great thoughts by Dimi and you might also find what Robert wrote in the Erlang Rationale worth a look :smiley:

These EF threads might also contain something of use?

:nerd_face:

Good luck and let us know how you get on :+1:

Where Next?

Popular Backend topics Top

AstonJ
I’ve seen more and more people get into Rust recently, so thought it would be cool to have a thread for people to share what they like ab...
New
New
New
CommunityNews
The Magic of Python Context Managers. Recipes for using and creating awesome Python context managers, that will make your code more read...
New
finner
During a recent code review I came across this scenario: Code in review if (input.getValue() != null) { return Arrays.asList(value);...
New
First poster: bot
About Self Self is a prototype-based dynamic object-oriented programming language, environment, and virtual machine centered around the p...
New
mudasobwa
To promote Tarearbol.DynamicManager I created the :heart_eyes_cat:-language (which is a brainfuck dialect.) Code outputting “Meow” to th...
New
mafinar
So I was thinking of trying out Crystal, I had tried it multiple times but left it midway. Now that there’s a book on it and it’s version...
New
almokhtar
Howdy, folks i have this question about it is ok to learn two different programming languages same time, well my story is i joined a comp...
New
Reinis
I’ve been diving into Bridgetown (a Jekyll successor) and learning about writing a more maintainable CSS.
New

Other popular topics Top

Devtalk
Hello Devtalk World! Please let us know a little about who you are and where you’re from :nerd_face:
New
wolf4earth
@AstonJ prompted me to open this topic after I mentioned in the lockdown thread how I started to do a lot more for my fitness. https://f...
New
dasdom
No chair. I have a standing desk. This post was split into a dedicated thread from our thread about chairs :slight_smile:
New
AstonJ
You might be thinking we should just ask who’s not using VSCode :joy: however there are some new additions in the space that might give V...
New
AstonJ
If you are experiencing Rails console using 100% CPU on your dev machine, then updating your development and test gems might fix the issu...
New
mafinar
Crystal recently reached version 1. I had been following it for awhile but never got to really learn it. Most languages I picked up out o...
New
foxtrottwist
A few weeks ago I started using Warp a terminal written in rust. Though in it’s current state of development there are a few caveats (tab...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Build efficient applications that exploit the unique benefits of a pure functional language, learning from an engineer who uses Haskell t...
New
hilfordjames
There appears to have been an update that has changed the terminology for what has previously been known as the Taskbar Overflow - this h...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Fight complexity and reclaim the original spirit of agility by learning to simplify how you develop software. The result: a more humane a...
New