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

AstonJ
This article was written by @rvirding …over a decade ago! Posting here in case anyone else finds it of interest and adding it to our Erla...
New
CommunityNews
Is Zig the Long Awaited C Replacement. Comparison with previous C contenders such as C++, D, Java, C#, Go, Rust and Swift https://erik...
New
New
First poster: AstonJ
Ten years without Elixir. I never got into Elixir, largely because it looked like Ruby. I was a Rubyist for a good while, spent time and...
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
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
tonyxrandall
When DoorDash approached the limits of what our Django-based monolithic codebase could support, we needed to design a new stack that woul...
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
penelopa
Learn how set up an RTMP server for free using the open-source Red5 software. This tutorial covers all steps from downloading the code fr...
New

Other popular topics Top

PragmaticBookshelf
Ruby, Io, Prolog, Scala, Erlang, Clojure, Haskell. With Seven Languages in Seven Weeks, by Bruce A. Tate, you’ll go beyond the syntax—and...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
From finance to artificial intelligence, genetic algorithms are a powerful tool with a wide array of applications. But you don't need an ...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Tailwind CSS is an exciting new CSS framework that allows you to design your site by composing simple utility classes to create complex e...
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
AstonJ
We’ve talked about his book briefly here but it is quickly becoming obsolete - so he’s decided to create a series of 7 podcasts, the firs...
New
Help
I am trying to crate a game for the Nintendo switch, I wanted to use Java as I am comfortable with that programming language. Can you use...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Author Spotlight Rebecca Skinner @RebeccaSkinner Welcome to our latest author spotlight, where we sit down with Rebecca Skinner, auth...
New
First poster: bot
zig/http.zig at 7cf2cbb33ef34c1d211135f56d30fe23b6cacd42 · ziglang/zig. General-purpose programming language and toolchain for maintaini...
New
AstonJ
This is cool! DEEPSEEK-V3 ON M4 MAC: BLAZING FAST INFERENCE ON APPLE SILICON We just witnessed something incredible: the largest open-s...
New
Fl4m3Ph03n1x
Background Lately I am in a quest to find a good quality TTS ai generation tool to run locally in order to create audio for some videos I...
New