Skip to content

Comment on Twenty Years of Open Source Erlang: A Retrospective from the trenchesparent

Comments

My sentiment exactly :)

I'm grateful that Elixir is putting Erlang under the spotlights. That it is doing a lot to conveying all the Erlang/OTP concepts and practices. But each time I use it - and I know I may be the odd duck based on slack, blog posts, etc - I feel like the syntax is so complex, with 4 different manners to write the same thing. And I'm not talking about "ways to do things", but literally syntactic ways to do the same thing.

literally syntactic ways to do the same thing.

Yup! They are not that many though (6 rules) and they are all documented here: https://hexdocs.pm/elixir/syntax-reference.html#syntactic-su...

Does the shorthand lambda belong on this list?

Thanks for all the work!

Oh, that's a very good question! It doesn't because the list linked above is about syntactical equivalence and the shorthand `&` has its own AST. But now you made me wonder if we should add it to the list anyway (with a caveat) as it would make the list more complete.

AboutSource Built by g1lg1l

Hackerly is an independent reader for Hacker News, built on the public HN API. Not affiliated with Y Combinator.