Elixir-Erlang support team

It was brought to my attention that some popular Erlang projects have issues with tickets being submitted that use Elixir syntax in examples or in some other way are Elixir specific. For me, it’s completely understandable, why that can be frustrating. The maintainer wants to make his software the best they can do it, yet they can’t understand the reported problem - they don’t know elixir well enough, or simply they don’t want to learn it, and we can’t blame them - we should be thankful for their great libraries. As an open source contributor, I can completely relate to that.

Fortunately, I think we can do something about it! I propose setting up a github team - either under the elixir organization or somewhere else - that could be simply @-mentioned in such issues. Members of the team would be able to translate the problematic code into erlang syntax, explain some elixir idioms and provide any other elixir-specific support to help solve the issue.

This will make lives of everybody easier - the issues will be solved faster, the maintainer will be less frustrated and any tension between communities that could arise from that kind of problems would have no reason to exit. I’m also sure we would be able to find couple people that could contribute in that way to the wider BEAM community.

PS. I urge all the maintainers of Elixir libraries wrapping some Erlang libraries to review if they give all the attribution that is necessary to the original project. Even if the license doesn’t require it, it’s simply the right thing to do.

PS2. The article that provoked this post: https://vagabond.github.io/rants/2017/01/03/hot-takes-on-elixir

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I’d be happy to look at those code posts and convert! I know both erlang and elixir very well. Feel free to @overminddl1 me on github. :slight_smile:

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I really like the idea, and I did already succesfully translate erl2ex and back at my university when I had to help out with some communication problems between a legacy erlang project (internal) and the elixir project for the thesis of my co-student (canceled that one due to illness and tries another project next semestre).

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I worked with both elixir and erlang. I’ll be happy to assist. Please add @phanimahesh to the team if it gets created. My schedule is a bit chaotic these days, but I’ll try to make time whenever I can.

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This is a great idea! I’d love to help out I’m @Ch4s3 on github.

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Great idea - pinned the topic until the end of the month :023:

I work in Elixir but, I’ve opened a few bugs against Erlang projects and had patches accepted. I’m pretty comfortable translating between the two. Happy to help if I can, I’m @rich on GitHub.

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I like this idea and I have some experience in rewriting Erlang code to Elixir. Feel free to add @romul to the team.

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me too. I’m @dch on github.

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I haven’t experienced these problems, but happy to help out by translating between the two :slight_smile:

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