Ending my elixir exploratory writing(lucassifoni.info) |
Ending my elixir exploratory writing(lucassifoni.info) |
I'd tried Go, which I didn't really like because it was too imperative for my taste and also required you to write every... single... thing you needed from scratch. (Not trying to start a flame war here -- it's just how I felt using it).
One of my engineers was kind of obsessed with Elixir (he was / is extremely smart) and he convinced me to give it a go over Christmas break. It really was the functional Valhalla he had made it out to be. I felt like I'd finally found a language that "got" how I wanted to approach writing code. Unfortunately, startup life got in the way, and I was hardly going to suggest an Elixir rewrite (well, I did try, but anyway).
I'm planning on re-approaching Elixir, as a haven to write code as a human. I still use LLMs for writing code pretty much daily, but if you're looking for something that's different and fun, I would recommend checking it out. It's just a shame to hear that the author is, for now at least, stopping their engagement with the community due to how they perceive it's changing!
Want to clarify for others reading that the author of _Elixir_ isn't stopping, just the author of this post. José has been shockingly responsive on recent issue/pr threads I've posted on Elixir-related repos recently, often same day. They also don't seem to use any bot-based code review, which is incredibly refreshing in contrast to many other repos[1] in 2026 (Sorry for the callout, it's just such a good example). Elixir projects have been a joy as a fairly new contributor, compared to other ecosystems.
Exlixir has a great std lib but fewer packages than I'd like in the community. I can't even recall what I wanted!
With go the std lib seems bigger (although very lacking in some data structures) but the third party packages are incredible.
I also find both languages similarly useful since I was mostly interested in sane concurrent primitives in a lang. The OTP is not that useful to me since I haven't had to run these services in anything close to serious but you can (kinda) take the OTP to other languages (they're principles after all).
This is a great follow-up that I don't have a satisfactory answer for, because I can't really recall. I _think_ I was trying to do something with Firebase w/ high parallelism using goroutines. I just remember the feeling of imperativeness when I was iterating through results, etc, and not having a built-in mapping function.
Elixir was totally different -- was just scratching an "intellectual" itch, and it fit my needs like a glove in terms of feeling.
I'm confident that I could learn to like Go, though, lots of people I know rave about it.
> The OTP is not that useful to me
Also agree, didn't really get into OTP even, just enjoyed the style and structure of the language itself!
I used to be extremely active on Elixir Forum. It was the main place I would interact with people online, and HN was a bit of a distant second. Now HN usage has spiked a bit and I now have a... ugh... reddit account. There is still some decent discussion there, but it's largely library announcements (many vibe coded), some blog posts (that are often about AI), and news posts. Questions about the language itself have, unsurprisingly, pretty much completely halted. I think around a month ago someone asked a syntax question -- it was a bit of a jump scare!
Edit, for the person whose comment is marked dead under mine and thus I cannot answer to : I was already very wary of publishing packages, because all abandoned packages start with a good intention. Now I will only publish something I depend on and use, and only if it has lived for a few months to years.
Prompted LLLM output only involves brains on the input side, the source training data. Nothing is communicated to the end user brain because they don’t try to understand the output and never had the knowledge or experience necessary to do so if they wanted to.
We need more human writing, not less.
I hope this trend reverses sometime soon.
Per Brandolini's law, genuine writing cannot ever compete with spam. The amount of humans is relatively the same while the ease of generating convincing blogspam has increased by multiple orders of magnitude.
Yours is a nice sentiment, but we have to accept that the Web is pretty much lost.
Now that it has, I'm overjoyed that my work has had some tiny part in training the models that are helping millions of people implement their tech ideas or even just write some text.
"The machine superintelligence learned from your ideas" is awesome sci-fi, not a reason for pearl-clutching. To stop publishing purely because you don't want AI to learn from you is misguided at best and misanthropic at worst.
But to me there's a strong difference between programming and non-programming things re: AI. I don't feel the same way about any other subject to write about.
It's not about wanting to keep things for myself in an ownership sense.
It's great that there are people that enjoy being a training bot for a corporate product, but some people still want to talk to other people. And if a system ever becomes an AGI, I am fairly sure it will no longer need any human input, so our days as training bots are likely numbered. Enjoy it while you can I guess.
FWIW I feel more or less the same _and_ I think this gives society a solid ground for demanding some sort of collective compensation from AI labs, just like mining or oil companies pay for natural resources https://distantprovince.substack.com/p/the-past-is-a-natural...
You do you, of course, but don't call it pearl-clutching if people have different worldviews.
Why not name them? These are people who no longer want to communicate with other people. They should be named and shamed. All their fake-interactions they do via LLMs should be made obvious at all times. That way real humans can instantly avoid these clowns.
I even feel my own writing has changed after reading claude-speak for a dozen months now.
If those people never "come back", yes, I'll have a more permanent opinion on them
I've noticed less comments on posts, but this is probably also the result of more AI-assisted Elixir projects being announced, not just the change in UI/UX.
I need to get to the list of topics in a forum, or to comments on a post damnit
Anyway, thanks, and back at you, and hi, and nice article :)
But ya, was a fun place. I loved reading it, I love helping on it and the more general chats. I even made some friends and found a job through it!
I feel like Elixir community is a bit too nice to call out obvious slop (some folks straight out post LLM-generated blog posts every week or so), so instead we could focus on elevating human effort. Recent Oban release for example had a note that all the docs a human-written. We should praise this!
Every single email and issue reply is also 100% human authored. People deserve to interact with humans online, especially when they have reached out for help and real interaction.
Ha, I missed this! I rarely click on any topics anymore, but I have noticed a trend of similar-sounding libraries being posted. Other than one person whose blog I already read a bit, I don't click on any of the blog posts anymore. It's not a conscious decision, I just open scan the topics, usually nothing looks interesting and a close the tab.
^ this one is pretty cool, pgmq does most of the work.
I've got a production service largely backed by Oban Pro and last month alone it handled running heavy ML tasks against ~200,000 long-form video files. Each analysis has multiple steps, all handled with Oban's dependent jobs feature, so there was something like a million unique jobs, and I don't think we hit a single production issue with Oban. Being able to connect into the cluster and directly manipulate things with Oban is a superpower.
Was not aware of these. Thanks!