Elixir obsoletes Ruby, Erlang and Clojure in one go

The author says Elixir brings together the best parts of Ruby, Erlang, and Clojure in one language. He presents it as a practical functional language with a pleasant syntax, strong concurrency support, macros, and a developer experience aimed at programmer happiness.

Reading notes

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• The author describes himself as a long-time Ruby programmer, a former Clojure fan, and someone who tried Erlang briefly.
• He says those languages are now obsolete.
• He argues that Elixir supersedes them by combining their strongest characteristics.
• He says Elixir is designed for programmer happiness and borrows Ruby’s appeal.
• He claims Elixir is the first language since Ruby to care about code beauty and language, library, and ecosystem UX.
• He notes that José Valim, a recognized Ruby programmer, invented Elixir.
• He says real-time web and IoT create new infrastructure demands because servers must keep many permanent open connections.
• He states that Elixir scales better than Node.js and that it does not have Node.js’s problems.
• He explains that Elixir runs on BEAM, the Erlang VM, and uses the Actor Model as a clean concurrency abstraction.
• He says the Erlang VM allows full concurrency without awkward async IO.
• He says Elixir lets the programmer do synchronous IO and still frees the underlying OS thread for other VM processes.
• He describes Elixir as one of the most practical functional languages.
• He says it takes features from Clojure such as immutable data structures, optional lazy evaluation, protocols, and records or structs.
• He adds that Elixir has true tail call optimization and the pipeline operator.
• He says its syntax is modern and Ruby-like.
• He says Elixir is close to homoiconic and that everyday syntax is sugar over data structures.
• He says Elixir supports full macros known from Lisp and Clojure without parenthesis-heavy syntax.
• He concludes that Ruby still has an advantage in mature libraries, but that Elixir packages are growing quickly.
• He mentions Phoenix as a strong alternative to Rails.
• He says Clojure is only hard to justify unless JVM compatibility is required.
• He says Erlang is unnecessary because Elixir is an almost strict superset of Erlang’s offering.
• He concludes that Elixir obsoletes Ruby, Clojure, and Erlang together.