The Gateway Drug
- 1 minFor a variety of reasons, functional programming is staging a comeback. For one, the rise of languages like Clojure and the wave of fame Erlang is riding with it’s Whatsapp success, it is not a surprise people are looking for more on information on the subject.
In an industry where Object-Oriented Programming has ruled for many years, this sort of feels like a revolution, especially if you consider that many functional languages were invented a long time ago (Lisp - 1958, Erlang - 1986 etc). As a result, more and more programmers are looking into this not-so-new paradigm.
A common problem occurs though which is not so much a programmer-specific problem but rather a problem most people would face. Unlearning old habits.
The above seems to be a big barrier for many people but it is a barrier that Elixir seems to have made more easy to jump. Doning a Ruby like syntax, it entices more and more people into it’s realm. Once one is in it, he/she quickly realizes that though it looks like Ruby, it’s nothing like Ruby. Everything is immutable. No assignment. Pattern Matching. Recursion over iteration. Dig a bit deeper and you find the fearsome Octopus that lies beneath; Erlang.
Elixir is also an attractive name. A potion, intended or not, it seems to also act as the gateway drug of non-functional people…
Personal blog of Makis Otman