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Discussion on: What is your opinion on Elixir language, why don't more developers use it?

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Rasmus Schultz

Main reason probably is it's functional. More developers are opening up to that in recent years, I think - as an increasing number of people realize that many of the patterns and practices that make mainstream languages work well at scale, in effect, leverage the functional features of those languages, and patterns that avoid or work around issues not found in functional languages. But there's a long way to go before any functional languages really goes mainstream, I think.

I think one reason developers don't jump all over this particular language is the syntax - it doesn't look like modern, mainstream languages and it's a bit heavy on both punctuation and keywords.

Another reason I'm not personally interested in this language is the lack of static types. For example, Elm is more interesting to me, providing a type system that is so strong that run-time errors don't actually exist. That's a significant quality that sets it apart from the mainstream languages.Folks can already do functional programming in most mainstream languages, so a purely functional language needs to do something new or different to motivate them to try it.

Have a look at Grain - a functional language with a clean, modern syntax that might feel more familiar to people coming from mainstream languages like JS or C#. It's very new, but promising, and has that Elm-style, run-time error-free strictness that I personally find very enticing. 🙂

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Kasun Vithanage

agree with this. I would love elixir if it was a typed language, its dead easy to do a mistake even when you changing the state of a GenServer and its not super easy to spot them without going line by line