Jet.com is hiring F# devs
andre1sk
PatNowak
For me comparing these two languages is like to compare whole programming paradigms. C# is different than Elixir, so you can learn it as well as and use when it’s useful. Languages are tools- don’t try to solve every issue in home with hammer. Same story here- Elixir will be great to other things that C# is.
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Onor.io
That’s a great point. If I lived in NYC I would definitely contact them. But I am in Michigan and they won’t consider remote workers.
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peerreynders
It’s a nice notion to be a Language Agnostic who will pick the right tool for the job but I would expect that many if not most developers don’t have the luxury of that choice (provided they cared). For example in 2007 at Google:
You have to play inside the fence defined by C++, Java, Python, and JavaScript.
i.e. anything not in that list cannot be the “right tool for the job”. And in many environments the selection of sanctioned languages/tools is even more restricted than that. For stakeholders “can I readily (and cheaply) hire developers for maintaining this” is a significant aspect for “the right tool for the job”. For Google this even became a primary consideration in the design of Go:
It must be familiar, roughly C-like. Programmers working at Google are early in their careers and are most familiar with procedural languages, particularly from the C family. The need to get programmers productive quickly in a new language means that the language cannot be too radical.
So given the existing install base of solutions already implemented in C# and given that developers familiar with C# are more readily available make it much more likely that C# will be used for something that F#, not to mention Elixir, is better suited for, not the other way around. So that gives C# has a huge advantage.
Elixir may need some help from people who also handle mainstream languages like C# in order to infiltrate the mainstream (rather than, for example, poaching the Ruby/Rails community) in order to “cross the chasm”.
For one it would be nice (and helpful) if Erlang was considered less niche and more mainstream. According to Bryan Hunter in his presentation CQRS with Erlang: “60% of the world’s mobile traffic is going through Erlang” - that should make it worth paying more attention to (but that didn’t seem to generate or require a tsunami of Erlang developers). Elixir as a “more accessible Erlang” should benefit from a wider awareness of Erlang’s maturity and capabilities.
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mkunikow
Yep I agree this is Google primary stack and I don’t think so they move something beyond this.
But it doesn’t mean than any can’t contribute to other languages for their’s APIs.
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Onor.io
It is also wise to remember that the “right tool for the job” is difficult to discern when the job itself is so often poorly defined.
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Neurofunk
Onor.io
In fairness (and yes I am splitting a hair here), F# is both more and less than OCaml on the .Net platform. F# adds Active Patterns (there’s no such thing in OCaml as far as I know). F# has modules like OCaml but the focus is more on namespaces which is in keeping with other .Net languages.
And, of course OCaml isn’t tied to the CLR. While Microsoft may argue otherwise (especially these days), CLR is still pretty much de facto Windows and Windows only. Yes, I know their efforts to port to Linux–but I also know that their efforts are still pretty much at the proof of concept level for now and it’s likely to be that way for the foreseeable future.
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keithn
While I quite liked Elixir/BEAM, I’ve actually gone with F#. It’s a statically typed functional language, supports lightweight processes, reasonably simple to use Actor model via orleans, there’s lots of tooling, and can leverage a large amount of libraries which allows integration with lots of things in a mostly effortless way. MS is pushing everything open source and cross platform as well.
Elixirs advantage is not really that it has BEAM / LWP / Actors etc… it’s that most everything gets built with that model in mind. Which is nice, F# doesn’t have that as it’s a smaller player in a larger ecosystem, so most things don’t explicitly take advantage of F#s capabilities/philosophy.
When it comes to actual coding… you can write in a very similar style in both, the main thing I like is the static typing in F#, which despite all the arguments for not having it in Elixir, it still helps eliminate errors.
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keithn
You may be interested to revisit .NET via F#, it has agents…
check out
and there are various things talking about how to easily get genserver type functionality using F# and then on top of that there is orleans
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