AstonJ

AstonJ

This is the Future of Webdev. Crazy, Right?

This was posted on the Elixir Forum and thought it was worth sharing here!

I love how the excitement of the author shines through and I think it does a great job highlighting the benefits of functional programming, Erlang/Elixir and Phoenix LiveView!

I’d be especially keen to hear what those of you who are using OOP languages think, and whether it’s enticed you to look at Elixir :sunglasses:

Most Liked

OvermindDL1

OvermindDL1

NaN === NaN; // -> false

This is actually correct, in any language. As per the floating point spec NaN equals nothing, not even itself. To return anything else would be failing the spec, so this is correct, not a javascript’ism (which has plenty of broken things to choose from).

As much as I want to agree with most of the article, it comes off a bit… high and mighty, and there are definitely some issues, like the fact it’s trying to go back to the ol’ RPC style calls from the long past.

And you don’t need immutability, you need either safe or no aliasing, which yes means you need immutability in most languages, but in languages like Rust you don’t, it has safe aliasing, even mutably, which means you can have both performance and safety of code where pure immutability has overhead you can’t get rid of. Pure functions are good though, to make a function impure in rust means you have to touch unsafe or something wrapping unsafe, lol, and of course without the aliasing issues then it’s safe to do as long as the unsafe code is written safe.

The Erlang VM is awesome though, especially as an orchestrational glue between parts written in native fast languages like rust. Rust can do what the Erlang VM does for its actor stuff, but it doesn’t have a great pattern for Erlang VM’s multi-node, not to say you can’t do it, just takes a lot more work.

Phoenix LiveView is just the old made new again, definitely harkens back to my Wt and N2o and such days, useful style to program pages in for server-driven code. ^.^

Phoenix channels are such a fascinating abstraction that even Rocket.rs is copying it, same names and terminology, lol.

SPA’s do still have their place however, especially if the client need to do a lot of its own calculations or little to no server communication or if it needs to run offline. It would be awesome to support both static, server side dynamic, (LiveView) and client-side dynamic (SPA) all in the same codebase though.

AstonJ

AstonJ

It’s always interesting to hear your thoughts ODL :blush:

I always think of Erlang/Elixir being the ‘brains’ of an app - basically co-ordinating everything else (like the muscle :joy:) however it’s great that you can get really far with Elixir itself (particularly with things like Phoenix and LiveView) :sunglasses:

Ah that’s interesting! A great indication that Phoenix got it right :smiley:

Rust is definitely cool - and so interesting! I can’t wait to start learning it, and I do wonder whether you should write a book about it one day!? Maybe even if it’s a Rust for Beginners or Get Started With Rust book that can be read before other books? :nerd_face:

OvermindDL1

OvermindDL1

If you ever have some time to burn I still recommend reading The Official Rust Book, lol. It’s just a bit of a crash course, the reference guide and docs are more comprehensive. of course ^.^

Where Next?

Popular Backend topics Top

New
First poster: bot
Why Zig When There is Already C++, D, and Rust? No hidden control flow No hidden allocations First-class support for no standard library...
New
First poster: bot
In a previous post we talked about implementing a simple video chat with WebRTC and Elixir. This update will touch on some of the API cha...
New
AstonJ
Just finished doing a clean install of macOS (which I highly recommend btw!) and have updated my macOS Ruby & Elixir/Erlang dev env s...
New
First poster: bot
Just a small test with lists in cython. Considering echosystem, multithreading and ease of use, Julia is a clear winner here.
New
CommunityNews
Functional programming is an increasing popular programming paradigm with many languages building or already supporting it. Go already su...
New
CommunityNews
This thread was posted by one of our members via one of our news source trackers.
New
brainlid
We take a deeper dive with Nathan Long into IOLists in Elixir. We cover what they are, how they work, the power they have when concatenat...
New
wolf4earth
Louis Pilfold is the creator of the Gleam programming language. He explains what Gleam is and tells us where it came from. He then dives...
New
brainlid
There is a new community resource available on writing “Safe Ecto Migrations”. When we get a migration wrong, it can lock up your product...
New

Other popular topics Top

DevotionGeo
I know that -t flag is used along with -i flag for getting an interactive shell. But I cannot digest what the man page for docker run com...
New
AstonJ
We have a thread about the keyboards we have, but what about nice keyboards we come across that we want? If you have seen any that look n...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Rust is an exciting new programming language combining the power of C with memory safety, fearless concurrency, and productivity boosters...
New
AstonJ
This looks like a stunning keycap set :orange_heart: A LEGENDARY KEYBOARD LIVES ON When you bought an Apple Macintosh computer in the e...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Learn different ways of writing concurrent code in Elixir and increase your application's performance, without sacrificing scalability or...
New
New
AstonJ
If you want a quick and easy way to block any website on your Mac using Little Snitch simply… File > New Rule: And select Deny, O...
New
New
New
New