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

dimitarvp
Apparently he decided to live-stream how he’s going to create a semver library.
New
New
First poster: bot
Such inflammatory, much wow. Unfortunately, Haskell itself agrees. Some languages naturally lend themselves towards adoption. Some don’t...
New
AstonJ
Not had time to read it yet but this looks like a good interview… Our friend Yukihiro Matsumoto, creator of the Ruby programming langua...
New
prajaut
Being a part of the tech industry, it would be good to share thoughts on specific technologies. Having surrounded by skilled and experie...
/go
New
First poster: malloryerik
Everyone outside of tech has heard of JavaScript, Java, Python, Ruby and even .Net, but few if any have heard of F#. However, F# may be o...
New
First poster: AstonJ
They expect you to make a onepage application (SPA) The polaris design system officially only supports react Integration with the s...
New
First poster: bot
I wrote Python for the last 10 years, and I always tend to write code in a “functional” way - map, filter, lambda and so on, it makes me ...
New
brainlid
In episode 78 of Thinking Elixir, we talk with Chase Granberry about Logflare. We learn why Chase started the company, what Logflare does...
New
brainlid
In episode 81 of Thinking Elixir, we talk with Digit and Quinn Wilton about the Burrito project. It wraps up Elixir to a single binary, e...
New

Other popular topics Top

PragmaticBookshelf
Take your Go skills to the next level by learning how to design, develop, and deploy a distributed service. Start from the bare essential...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Stop developing web apps with yesterday’s tools. Today, developers are increasingly adopting Clojure as a web-development platform. See f...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Machine learning can be intimidating, with its reliance on math and algorithms that most programmers don't encounter in their regular wor...
New
ohm
Which, if any, games do you play? On what platform? I just bought (and completed) Minecraft Dungeons for my Nintendo Switch. Other than ...
New
Rainer
My first contact with Erlang was about 2 years ago when I used RabbitMQ, which is written in Erlang, for my job. This made me curious and...
New
AstonJ
There’s a whole world of custom keycaps out there that I didn’t know existed! Check out all of our Keycaps threads here: https://forum....
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Learn different ways of writing concurrent code in Elixir and increase your application's performance, without sacrificing scalability or...
New
Margaret
Hello everyone! This thread is to tell you about what authors from The Pragmatic Bookshelf are writing on Medium.
1147 29994 760
New
First poster: bot
zig/http.zig at 7cf2cbb33ef34c1d211135f56d30fe23b6cacd42 · ziglang/zig. General-purpose programming language and toolchain for maintaini...
New
RobertRichards
Hair Salon Games for Girls Fun Girls Hair Saloon game is mainly developed for kids. This game allows users to select virtual avatars to ...
New