Ask HN: Should I learn Rust or Go?

Re:Ask HN: Should I learn Rust or Go? by LecroJS on Monday July 04, 2022 @09:18AM (#31976713)

This is the first I’ve heard a recommendation to learn elixir. I’m definitely interested based on your description + a quick google. Is there anything that comes to mind in terms of what it does different from Go/Rust that makes you recommend it? My understanding was that I’d get these types of benefits from those two languages

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Re:Ask HN: Should I learn Rust or Go? by leetrout on Monday July 04, 2022 @09:29AM (#31976814)

Painting with a broad brush... Elixir is like the new ruby where Go is like the new C and Rust is like the new C++.

Elixir shines at concurrency so it will feel more like nodejs and similarly runs on a VM like Node or Java.

Elixir, like Rust, will help with learning functional programming paradigms more than Go.

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Re:Ask HN: Should I learn Rust or Go? by anonymous23801 on Monday July 04, 2022 @09:39AM (#31976909)

I disagree here, Elixir looks similar to Ruby from a syntax perspective. But as soon as you dig into OTP it is a completely new world.

It's true that as a beginner you can simply do web development with Phoenix and that feels similar to Rails (Or Django / Laravel / Spring / whatever web framework ). But OTP requires a different way of approaching problems.

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Re:Ask HN: Should I learn Rust or Go? by throwawaymaths on Monday July 04, 2022 @10:17PM (#31983616)

I think your comparisons are at the superficial "what does syntax look like" level. If you're thinking culturally, roles, what they're expected to be used for, what hires look like:

Elixir is the new Erlang. Ruby is dead (I used to <3 ruby). Go is the new python, zig is the new c, and rust is the new c++.

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Re:Ask HN: Should I learn Rust or Go? by anonymous23801 on Monday July 04, 2022 @09:35AM (#31976873)

I don't think Go or Rust provides anything similar to what you have in Erlang/Elixir. I've done a lot of Ruby and then while learning Haskell and Elm has been a paradigm change with their type systems, Elixir/Erlang felt like a much bigger step in terms of a different required way of approaching problems.

It's not that it's functional (that's completely secondary in Erlang) but its fault tolerance primitives (processes, pids, mailboxes, monitors and links) and the OTP abstractions (GenServers, Supervisors, etc).

You learn to think in terms of distributed systems and think about fault tolerance in a way you cannot in other languages as they don't provide the primitives. It's quite a big leap and it takes time to sink in.

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