I have seen a podcast and now most recently a video (lonestar 2019) stating that Elixir is done:
What does it mean? Does it mean the core concepts are now completed for v1.0 ?
Does it mean the Elixir team will now go on a (well deserved) vacations and allow another team to take hold?
I have this idea that the community has to pick the direction where Elixir is going next, but everyone in a community wants different things. Some want types, some want more Nerves, others want more processes and others something more Haskell like.
I have trouble understanding what this all mean. Mostly, I fear this means Elixir will stagnate for the rest of year due to a lack of direction and purpose.
The idea is that Elixir has all the building blocks necessary to build libraries on top of it. Think of it as stable in the LTS sense or the Clojure sense rather than abandoned. To turn the question around, what features do you think are still missing that cannot be built on top of everything that already exists? Bugfixes and such will obviously still happen, and if something came up that could not be completed externally, they would add them to core. But at this point, I’m not sure what those things are.
To be brief… You say “done”, which makes Elixir sound like a project in and of itself, rather than a tool to complete other projects. Maybe it is? I don’t know. Many people have worked exceptionally hard to create a language, ecosystem of libraries/frameworks and a community that together is an outstanding tool.
Concerns over the direction of a language/framework/library, it’s adoption, it’s perception, etc are closely linked to the notion of languages as fashion items. These are matters for those seeking the language-du-jour, rather than a reliable tool with which they can work.
So, regardless of whether more work is done, or what exists will simply continute to exist (does that equate to stagnation?) — I and many others will continue to use Elixir for what it is: the best tool for the work I do.
It means that language is ready and it’s extendable enough and there will be no version 2.0. It will still get bug fixes and things like that. This means that you as developer don’t always have to learn new feature of the language and old code will be readable for years to come, it’s a good thing. This also means all those man hours can now be put into Erlang ecosystem & libraries (that Elixir is part of) instead, because you have this language stability promise.
In a hundred years, Elixir likely won’t exist. The process in which future applications are going to be generated shall challenge our imagination. Web dies. Keyboard/mouse/screen interaction dies. All goes its path. If you seek something eternal write code that changes the world forever. I would not worry too much about the language you choose to do so.
I saw in another post they said the language is mostly done and now they’re going to focus on adoption and spreading the words to companies and devs.
This basically is really good news since Erlang is quite a small language too. Coming from Scala having such a huge amount of syntax and keywords. Erlang and Elixir language are refreshing in being small and compact.
I was in the room for this talk and I don’t think he meant it like you’re interpreting it. He didn’t mean done as in finished, complete, no more work being done on it. He meant stable. In that talk, Bruce emphasized the 1 breaking change since 2014 I believe. That was a call to the enterprise, to those who are change averse out of necessity. Elixir is stable, he was saying, so it’s safe to come join us.
If you couple Bruce’s talk with Jose’s, you get the sense of a language moving very much in the direction of Python and the PSF. That’s a very good thing for Elixir in the long run. Far from being done, it basically means that it’s getting started for real now.
I saw both talks in person. I take it to mean “there are no breaking features (in the semantic versioning sense) in the plans for Elixir.” Feature enhancements will continue, but things are pretty stable, so build upon this foundation. I worry it is misconstrued.
That’s exactly right, the community is responsible for where the Elixir ecosystem is going. And if some prefer to make it more like Haskell and others to focus on Nerves. That’s totally fine.
What we refer as “done” (stable is a better word) is the Elixir language. We are not handing the codebase of the Elixir language to someone else. The goal is exactly to not change the language/core/foundation.
