Hi!
I am…
Been poking at Elixir and associated libraries (Phoenix, Nerves, Nx) over the last 10 years or so. It’s all been fun side projects and I’ve enjoyed it a ton. Looking forward to working in Elixir too, which I’ll get to do someday!
Rewriting a small subset of our legacy website (PHP - Zend Framework 1) to Elixir+Phoenix with LiveView. I wrote our website in 2011-12 (about 50+ modules), but last year I decided to rewrite the client facing parts to Elixir. So far the experience has been great.
Prior to that, I wrote server side Elixir to extract data from Florida Dept. of State for further processing (new business registrations), DBF parser, and other small utils.
My previous long-running side project (the elixir-powered telescope mentioned in this thread earlier) is a bit paused until the start of summer because it involves a lot of hardware (finishing the mirror, mainly). These days I’m re-implementing a small language, ovo2*, that I had written in Typescript, but in Elixir.
It looks a lot like Elixir syntax, with removed infix operators. I used it previously in a frontend long-long-term-side-project, to have a TS-hosted small data manipulation language that could be edited both visually and with text. Since I’m a bit further in the project, and I’d like to evaluate those scripts on the server, I’m reimplementing it in Elixir.
Here’s the full supported “syntax sheet” until now. It’s a great exercise to re-implement a tokenizer, parser combinators, etc, from scratch 
. As usual, the goal is mainly my own distraction and learning, so I’m not shooting for efficiency. I try to implement stuff first, then research how it should be done.
This mini-language has no IO. The program has a special symbol called data that represents the input data. The output is the last evaluated expression. Everything evaluates to a value, so you don’t have single-branch conditions for example. Its goal is to allow my users (so, me) to visually write data transforms in my automation app. But the real goal is amusement.
bar = 6
age = add(access(data, `age`), bar)
say_hi = \name, age ->
join([name, `has the age`, to_string(age)], ``)
end
say_hi(access(data, `name`), age)
fibs = \a ->
if greater_or_equals(a, 2) then
add(fibs(subtract(a, 1)), fibs(subtract(a, 2)))
else
1
end
end
fibs(10)
I’m implementing the evaluation these days. The choice of removing all infix operators was made to make the visual editor / representation of the language simpler and more in-line with the text representation.
Here’s a screenshot of the previous typescript implementation’s visual editor :
I’ll go for something more “bubbly” than just nested blocks this time, and try to do it in liveview .
*the language is called ovo2 because ovo1 was a script language I wanted to design in 2015 and that did not go anywhere ^^ . Technically, I’m now at ovo3 since I changed the syntax again.
It’s the only decent ebook that I am aware of on the subject of LiveView, especially one that is kept reasonably up to date.
