I was talking to a colleague who was expounding about the coolness of elixir. So I thought I should give it a try. In the spirit of doing something non-trivial to learn a new tool, I decided to port over the IRC bot I’ve been working on in go and ruby (which passes my bar for non-triviality).
You can check it out here. It does the same super-simple (but easily extensible) bot behaviour of replying to a specific salutation.
Elixir seems pretty nice. It’s syntax is clearly influenced by ruby, which is great. It is familiar enough that you want to be able to pick it up. But once you dig in a little bit you start finding that nothing is quite what you’d expect. I ended up feeling a bit like I was coding a hybrid of go and ruby. That was great because those are what I’ve been working on exclusively for the past eighteen months (ignoring inevitable forays into JS).
The error messages are pretty helpful, definitely less onerous than those in go. And I didn’t hit any head-wall situations. So far it has been very developer friendly. The online documentation is good, but there doesn’t seem to be as much on google or stack overflow as I’m used to seeing in most other languages. I’d love to keep working in elixir if I ever get the chance.