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A comment on Beam/Erlang/Elixir Concept Explanations. Parent comment

Re:Beam/Erlang/Elixir Concept Explanations by dnautics on Sunday September 12, 2021 @03:57PM (#28504345)
There was a class aimed at middle school? Iirc Students where they were taught erlang and by the end of two classes they had built a crude networked chat system, which, believe it or not, gets their attention. You can't really do that so easily in any other language system.

> I don't know that beginners should think about [immutable by default].

Yeah. Beginners should not have to think about mutability. So, immutability by default is the right choice. Details like "why don't integers mutate when passed to a function versus a dict" should not ever have to be answered to a beginner.

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Re:Beam/Erlang/Elixir Concept Explanations by joelbluminator on Monday September 13, 2021 @12:15AM (#28507799)
Right, no one has ever built a chat system with Node or PHP or Python...just super hard. Like importing a library and 10 lines of code hard.
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Re:Beam/Erlang/Elixir Concept Explanations by scns on Monday September 13, 2021 @03:46AM (#28508845)
That is taking an off the shelf solution and adding some glue. I bet it's much easier to build such a system from scratch, using Erlang/BEAM, since communication is in its' "DNA".
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Re:Beam/Erlang/Elixir Concept Explanations by joelbluminator on Monday September 13, 2021 @04:21AM (#28509026)
Erlang/BEAM is also off the shelf solution, whose to say what's the "right amount" of abstraction a beginner should use? If you really wanna teach a student what's happening in the computer have them use assembly or maybe C, that's pretty much the only way.
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Re:Beam/Erlang/Elixir Concept Explanations by dnautics on Monday September 13, 2021 @10:21AM (#28511849)
yeah try doing that with a room of 12-year olds. They will immediately tune out when you don't bother to explain what "import" is, or when you have to explain how APIs work, what options are, why you need option X, why 3rd party API of your choice requires this function signature?. Dead in the fucking water.
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