Erlang is my favorite functional language out of all the ones I've tried. The matchers, guards, etc are all done very well. But I don't like functional. I used to think it was cool, gave it a real chance using Erlang for years, and eventually decided it's not a good fit for many use cases. Like at some point the neatness of doing all loops as recursion wears off and it's just tiring. It's not like CS algo homework, and even there you often want DP/memoization.
replyEdit: pure* functional
> Like at some point the neatness of doing all loops as recursion wears off and it's just tiring.
replyOdd, but I believe you, lol. Elixir's list comprehensions take a `:reduce` option which makes accumulating values a bit more "familiar" and I often use over `reduce`:
for a <- list, reduce: []
acc ->
[a | acc]
end
If you already have a list in Erlang, you can use map and the foldl/foldr reducers. But there's no general for-loop. You're expected to use tail recursion.
replyAlso tbh, I don't like reduce either. I agree with that article posted on HN a while back about devs not liking reduce. Just want to insert into my list or whatever, not have to check how exactly reduce works in this particular language.
I'm the same. I thought I was an oddball because so many people seemed to prefer Elixir but I like Erlang and its syntax. I wish I had more chances to use it at work but so far it's just been for hobby projects or playing with.
replyThere are dozens of us! Erlang is a great language, elixir just feels kinda flimsy and over-macro’d to me somehow.
replyWhat was your background before Erlang? I came from Ruby, so Elixir felt much more like home than Erlang.
replyI was fortunate enough to use Erlang professionally for a couple of years. I agree: the syntax is quite comfortable.
reply