Elixir alliances - with who?

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We often see alliances in the programming world - some big, some small. Often they are with frameworks adopting some tech or another (or at times even methodologies, such as MVC, MVVM etc). Rails and Coffeescript springs to mind, and more closer to home, Phoenix has just adopted Milligram. On an Elixir level, there is of course the biggest alliance of them all - between it and Erlang/The BEAM.

These alliances can be beneficial for all involved - often, one part of the alliance gains more users/exposure, which in turn usually means more hands on, traction, motivation, a more polished product etc. Usually resulting in a win win for everyone involved :003:

So, what alliances would you like to see or think might be cool? :101:

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Between all server-side rendering frameworks: Phoenix Web, Phoenix LiveView, Drab, Texas come to mind. What would be even bigger: alliance between all these and one frontend community, like React and React Native.

We need to start commoditizing apps and software in general. People will, apparently, never tire of religious language wars. We should however be practical and strive to make alliances and bring tech from different tiers and levels together in the hopes of streamlined and WTF-free experience.

IMO the commoditization of programming is imminent / inevitable. It’s best if we start working on that – and make money off of it – than denying it.

I believe the Elixir community is uniquely positioned in that regard. Most of us know a plethora of other tech that we use every day as well as Elixir.

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I don’t know if “alliance” is the right word, but I would love to see AWS support something like autoscaling Elixir processes. Sort of like Lambda or Step Functions, but using Elixir processes and communication in which the number of processes could be scaled up according to load, without being tied to specific EC2 instances. I know you could approximate something like this with ECS Autoscaling Groups, but it would be great if it was closer to the way you can just spin up Lambdas when you need them.

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I’d like to see much a much stronger alliance with the Erlang people.

As far as I can see, Elixir folk use a lot of Erlang code - not surprising since the Erlang libraries have been around for a long time. But Erlang folks don’t use much Elixir code.

If you search in the Elixir forums you find a lot of help if you want to call Erlang code - but If you search in the Erlang forums you find little about how to call Elixir code.

There are some amazing things going on here - a simple example would be scenic - Erlang has never had a decent native GUI, so this is fantastic, but a quick search in the principle Erlang mail list never mentions scenic.

The Erlang mailing list (see http://erlang.org/mailman/listinfo/erlang-questions) goes back to 1997 and is a treasure trove of useful information.

I suspect that a relatively small number of people are members of both groups (I know that @rvirding and I am) but the names that crop up regularly here and there are very different.

If you want to strengthen both communities I would recommend joining the erlang questions group (the reference was earlier) - then just lurk - read the mails.

You might find it easier to find collaborators in the Erlang group than in this group - after all if you’re interested in the same problem then you should be able to work something out.

I regularly collaborate in multi-language projects (for example in SonicPi, which is mainly Ruby you’ll find a a complete Erlang system hidden under the covers, so you could drop some compiled Elixir into SonicPi and have fun making music)

If you want to spread “X written in Elixir” then write a mail “how to call X from Erlang” and post it to the Erlang group.

Many packages and frameworks mentioned here are not discussed in the Erlang mailing lists - there seems to be no or very little discussions about things like Phoenix and friends.

I have a feeling that certain questions asked in this group could be very quickly answered in the Erlang groups and vice versa.

I would urge you all to join both groups and cross post questions and build on the strengths of both communities.

There have been a lot of new books on Elixir (fantastic) - but what I’m waiting to read is"calling Elixir packages from Erlang" - any budding authors out their :slight_smile:

Several Elixir packages are thin interfaces over underlying Erlang code - there are good reasons for this - it’s nice not to have to learn a new language to get something done. I haven’t seen projects in the opposite direction - for example make Phoenix available to Erlang programmers in way that fits with their way of thinking and hides all the Elixir.

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