Though it’s natural (and reasonable) for developers to focus on the technical differences, there’s more to it. All software operates as part of a complex system that includes humans, culture, practises etc. The technical differences are variously significant (JVM vs BEAM) or trivial (syntax), but culture & context also matters.
My view (based on clojure and elixir being my ‘hobby languages’ for 2020 and 2021 respectively) is that they operate differently in the sociocultural sense. Clojure emphasises self-assembly of solution styles from orthogonal and self-chosen libraries; Elixir ergonomics and community-wide architectural styles. So for a beginner (to the language/platform, not to development) Clojure’s expectation is that your scaffolding comes from your immediate team. Elixir provides that scaffolding in its standard libraries & tooling.
Personally, as a lone hobbyist with both platforms, I enjoyed both in different ways. Clojure appealed to me more initially (wonderful REPL, the JVM because of familiarity, LISP syntax, and the core collection types & libraries); but over time I’ve managed to actually produce much more with Elixir. I’m pretty sure I would have been as productive in Clojure if I was working within an established team (though a team new to Clojure would have been in the same position as me).
Although this was hinted at in some of the posts, I’d like to make it explicit: Clojure’s community includes some truly brilliant people. Without taking anything away from our own rock stars, I’ll assert that Rich Hickey is three of the smartest people in the field.
So, even though Clojure’s (lack of) syntax makes my eyes cross, I’ve watched a huge number of Clojure video presentations and recommend doing so to anyone who wants to understand the philosophy behind both Clojure and much of Elixir.
The community is a lot more active, this forum is 10 times more active than any Clojure forum (and possible a lot more active than most forums for any language)
Tons of books, which I cant really explain, but there significantly more books on elixir and the elixir eco system, compared to Clojure, and again compared to many more languages (I think there is more books on Elixir than there are books on Erlang or the BEAM itself)
The ecosystem is a lot less fragmented , Elixir have fewer framework, but they seem to be maintained better, specially compare to pure Clojure framework, if you ignore the Java framework to which Clojure might have access
The type system being added to Elixir, I dont think anything similar is in the works for Clojure, although it remains to be seen how much benefit this will have, but its definitely something to look into
Point 1 and 2, makes learning Elixir more enjoyable and you will have better support to learn it
Point 3, make using Elixir better if you are a Solo Developer or a Beginner
Point 4, depending on how it goes, might give Elixir the language some technical edge over Clojure
That being said, I like Clojure more purely as a language, coding Clojure in Emacs, is weirdly enjoyable
I really hope, that any lisp will one day succeed in having a nice implementation and ecosystem (Clojure is very close but not really there) until then … you have Elixir
I might be able to shed some light on this - essentially, I feel this is down to a culture of learning, one that that we ‘inherited’ from Ruby.
I first spoke about this in a blog post about Ruby over a decade ago (I really can’t believe it’s been that long!!) I’ll quote the relevant part here:
Not only does all of that apply to Elixir as well, but I think we turned it up a notch too - by directly getting involved with some of the world’s best tech publishers. Not just by instilling that same culture of learning, or by organising our book giveaways (which gives publishers lots of all year round exposure) but by means of our discount codes - which people love and from what I’m told, have been used very extensively. Publishers are ultimately a business, so what are they going to do if they get a lot of sales from a particular language? Publish more books about it!
While it was always our intent to foster a culture of learning here on the forum, I don’t think any of us ever expected it to go quite as far as it has. I for one am super happy that it did.
