Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

April 2, 2012

Elixir – A modern approach to programming for the Erlang VM

Filed under: Elixir,Erlang — Patrick Durusau @ 5:46 pm

Elixir

From the homepage:

Elixir is a programming language built on top of the Erlang VM. As Erlang, it is a functional language built to support distributed, fault-tolerant, non-stop applications with hot code swapping.

Elixir is also dynamic typed but, differently from Erlang, it is also homoiconic, allowing meta-programming via macros. Elixir also supports polymorphism via protocols (similar to Clojure’s), dynamic records and provides a reference mechanism.

Finally, Elixir and Erlang share the same bytecode and data types. This means you can invoke Erlang code from Elixir (and vice-versa) without any conversion or performance hit. This allows a developer to mix the expressiveness of Elixir with the robustness and performance of Erlang.

If you want to install Elixir or learn more about it, check our getting started guide. [Former link, http://elixir-lang.org/getting_started/1.html updated to: http://elixir-lang.org/getting-started/introduction.html.]

Quite possibly of interest to Erlang programmers.

Take a close look at the languages mentioned in the Wikipedia article on homoiconicity as other examples of homoiconic languages.

Question: The list contains “successful” and “unsuccessful” languages. Care to comment on possible differences that account for the outcomes?

Thinking a “successful” semantic mapping language will need to have certain characteristics. The question is, of course, which ones?

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