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Elixir vs F#: What are the differences?

Introduction:

Elixir and F# are two programming languages that differ in several aspects. This Markdown code provides a comparison between Elixir and F#, highlighting the key differences in six specific areas.

  1. Concurrency Model: Elixir provides built-in support for concurrency with its lightweight processes and message-passing mechanism using actors. It utilizes the Erlang virtual machine (BEAM) to achieve high scalability and fault tolerance. On the other hand, F# primarily relies on the .NET Framework's concurrency features, such as async/await and Task Parallel Library, to handle concurrency and parallelism.

  2. Functional Programming Paradigm: Both Elixir and F# embrace functional programming; however, Elixir is a pure functional language, while F# is a hybrid language that combines functional and object-oriented programming. Elixir's functional nature encourages immutability and emphasizes the use of higher-order functions, pattern matching, and recursion. F# provides features like immutable data structures, higher-order functions, and currying, but also incorporates object-oriented concepts through its interoperability with .NET.

  3. Syntax and Language Design: Elixir adopts a Ruby-inspired syntax with a focus on readability and expressive code. It emphasizes the use of pipelines, pattern matching, and macro-based metaprogramming. On the other hand, F# has a syntax influenced by OCaml and adopts a more ML-family language style with a strong static type system and powerful type inference capabilities. It promotes a more terse and concise coding style with features like pipe forward operator and discriminated unions.

  4. Tooling and Ecosystem: Elixir's tooling and ecosystem are centered around the Mix build tool and the Hex package manager. It provides a rich set of libraries and frameworks, including the popular Phoenix web framework. F#, being part of the .NET ecosystem, benefits from the extensive tooling and libraries available for .NET. It leverages tools like Visual Studio and the NuGet package manager, along with frameworks such as ASP.NET and Xamarin.

  5. Error Handling and Fault Tolerance: Elixir promotes the "let it crash" philosophy, where processes are isolated and errors are allowed to propagate, leading to fault-tolerant systems. It provides supervisors that automatically restart failed processes. F#, on the other hand, follows a more traditional error handling approach using try/catch blocks and optional types. It relies on exception handling and the Result type to handle and propagate errors.

  6. Community and Adoption: Elixir has gained popularity primarily within the web development community, especially for building scalable and real-time applications. It has a growing community that actively contributes to its ecosystem. F#, being part of the .NET ecosystem, benefits from the wider adoption of .NET and is prominent in areas like financial programming, data science, and machine learning. It has a strong community and is supported by Microsoft.

In Summary, Elixir and F# differ in their concurrency models, functional programming emphasis, syntax and language design, tooling and ecosystem, error handling approaches, and community adoption.

Advice on Elixir and F#
Needs advice
on
C#C#F#F#
and
KotlinKotlin

Hi there. I want to expand my coding toolset. So I want to learn a second backend language besides Kotlin. Kotlin is fantastic. I love it in every aspect, and I think I can never return to Java. And also why should I? It is 100% interoperable with java and can co-exist in every project.

So my question here is. Which language do you think will bring me more joy? I think F#; it is more like Kotlin. Then C# (it's more or like 100% java). But, let's say I learn F#. Is it 100% interoperable like Kotlin? can they live side by side? Can I, then, apply to .NET jr jobs after a while, for example, or is C# the holy cow? I would like to learn .Net.

If it is the worst and only C# is acceptable, then which language should I learn? Dart? Go?

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Replies (3)
Recommends
on
C#C#KotlinKotlin

Exceptional decision to go with Kotlin. For the other story, go full with C#. "is C# the holy cow? Yes it is.". Specially now when netCore is crossplatform and you can build asp.net core applications on Windows, Linux and macOS via Visual Studio Code which is also multiplatform. Nothing will beat C# in the near future. Also, at the end of 2021 Microsoft will release Net 6.0 which will include MAUI.

"For those new to .NET MAUI (standing for .NET Multi-platform App UI), Microsoft says it's "the evolution of Xamarin.Forms extended from mobile to desktop scenarios with UI controls rebuilt from the ground up for performance and extensibility."

So, C# all the way sire!

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Recommends
on
C#C#

animefanx1,

First let's get your questions sorted: Which language do you think will bring me more joy?

This you will have to decide for yourself, I am a long time C# developer and have seen it grow into a very compelling platform. The language and I'd compare it more to Kotlin than Java (by a long margin). More on .NET in a bit.

say I learn F#. Is it 100% interoperable like Kotlin?

You can have 100% interop with a caveat, your F# libraries have to implement certain guidance in order to be referenced from C#. Some (dare I say most) of the differences between F# and C# are predicated on language constructs that are not available in C#. For instance F# functions that return Unit.

can they live side by side?

Yes.

Can I, then, apply to .NET jr jobs after a while, for example, or is C# the holy cow?

I don't know if I take your meaning, but let me say this: Learning either C# or F# will likely force you to understand concepts such as garbage collection, primitive types, etc. which apply to all .NET languages, thus a lot of the effort you put into .NET is bound to pay off regardless of your choice.

If it is the worst and only C# is acceptable, then which language should I learn? Dart? Go? You can't go wrong with any of these and I venture to say whether you select C#, F#, Dart or Go as your next adventure, your willingness to learn will take you to try other languages, some which mey not even exist yet!

PS1: .NET is an end to end environment now. With the introduction of Blazor and Razor pages one does not need JavaScript or other browser scripting languages, it even interops with JavaScript. PS2. Microsoft is working on unifying .NET. Soon there will be only one version: .NET 5! Caveat: Some features such as WinForms will still be specific to the windows environment but all of those are likely things you don't need in Mac or Linux

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GolangGolang

I think you can learn go instead C#. C# is cool, but Golang also cool. It can run on any OS without specific software. C# can run on linux too but it's only the .NET Core as I know. But golang is flexible. So try it and decide what do you think about Golang

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Decisions about Elixir and F#

#rust #elixir So am creating a messenger with voice call capabilities app which the user signs up using phone number and so at first i wanted to use Actix so i learned Rust so i thought to myself because well its first i felt its a bit immature to use actix web even though some companies are using Rust but we cant really say the full potential of Rust in a full scale app for example in Discord both Elixir and Rust are used meaning there is equal need for them but for Elixir so many companies use it from Whatsapp, Wechat, etc and this means something for Rust is not ready to go full scale we cant assume all this possibilities when it come Rust. So i decided to go the Erlang way after alot of Thinking so Do you think i made the right decision?Am 19 year programmer so i assume am not experienced as you so your answer or comment would really valuable to me

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Timm Stelzer
VP Of Engineering at Flexperto GmbH · | 18 upvotes · 601.1K views

We have a lot of experience in JavaScript, writing our services in NodeJS allows developers to transition to the back end without any friction, without having to learn a new language. There is also the option to write services in TypeScript, which adds an expressive type layer. The semi-shared ecosystem between front and back end is nice as well, though specifically NodeJS libraries sometimes suffer in quality, compared to other major languages.

As for why we didn't pick the other languages, most of it comes down to "personal preference" and historically grown code bases, but let's do some post-hoc deduction:

Go is a practical choice, reasonably easy to learn, but until we find performance issues with our NodeJS stack, there is simply no reason to switch. The benefits of using NodeJS so far outweigh those of picking Go. This might change in the future.

PHP is a language we're still using in big parts of our system, and are still sometimes writing new code in. Modern PHP has fixed some of its issues, and probably has the fastest development cycle time, but it suffers around modelling complex asynchronous tasks, and (on a personal note) lack of support for writing in a functional style.

We don't use Python, Elixir or Ruby, mostly because of personal preference and for historic reasons.

Rust, though I personally love and use it in my projects, would require us to specifically hire for that, as the learning curve is quite steep. Its web ecosystem is OK by now (see https://www.arewewebyet.org/), but in my opinion, it is still no where near that of the other web languages. In other words, we are not willing to pay the price for playing this innovation card.

Haskell, as with Rust, I personally adore, but is simply too esoteric for us. There are problem domains where it shines, ours is not one of them.

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Pros of Elixir
Pros of F#
  • 172
    Concurrency
  • 161
    Functional
  • 133
    Erlang vm
  • 112
    Great documentation
  • 105
    Great tooling
  • 86
    Immutable data structures
  • 81
    Open source
  • 77
    Pattern-matching
  • 62
    Easy to get started
  • 59
    Actor library
  • 32
    Functional with a neat syntax
  • 29
    Ruby inspired
  • 25
    Erlang evolved
  • 24
    Homoiconic
  • 22
    Beauty of Ruby, Speed of Erlang/C
  • 17
    Fault Tolerant
  • 14
    Simple
  • 13
    High Performance
  • 11
    Pipe Operator
  • 11
    Good lang
  • 11
    Doc as first class citizen
  • 9
    Stinkin' fast, no memory leaks, easy on the eyes
  • 9
    Fun to write
  • 8
    Resilient to failure
  • 8
    OTP
  • 6
    GenServer takes the guesswork out of background work
  • 4
    Not Swift
  • 4
    Pattern matching
  • 4
    Idempotence
  • 4
    Fast, Concurrent with clean error messages
  • 3
    Easy to use
  • 2
    Dynamic Typing
  • 2
    Error isolation
  • 53
    Pattern-matching
  • 42
    Makes programming fun again
  • 38
    Type providers
  • 32
    Delightful
  • 30
    Frictionless
  • 26
    Static type inference
  • 21
    Composable
  • 19
    Ml syntax
  • 17
    REPL
  • 17
    Succinct
  • 10
    DDD
  • 9
    Making invalid states impossible
  • 7
    Great community
  • 7
    WebSharper
  • 7
    Language support for units of measure
  • 6
    Functional Programming
  • 6
    Powerful
  • 5
    Beautiful Code
  • 5
    Compact
  • 5
    Multiplatform
  • 5
    Functional paradigm
  • 5
    Computation Expressions
  • 5
    Open source
  • 5
    Less bugs
  • 5
    Productive
  • 4
    Allow use JS and .NET libraries
  • 4
    Object oriented features
  • 4
    Fun to write

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Cons of Elixir
Cons of F#
  • 11
    Fewer jobs for Elixir experts
  • 7
    Smaller userbase than other mainstream languages
  • 5
    Elixir's dot notation less readable ("object": 1st arg)
  • 4
    Dynamic typing
  • 1
    Difficult to understand
  • 1
    Not a lot of learning books available
  • 3
    Microsoft tend to ignore F# preferring to hype C#
  • 2
    Interop between C# can sometimes be difficult
  • 1
    Hype
  • 1
    Type Providers can be unstable in larger solutions

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What is Elixir?

Elixir leverages the Erlang VM, known for running low-latency, distributed and fault-tolerant systems, while also being successfully used in web development and the embedded software domain.

What is F#?

F# is a mature, open source, cross-platform, functional-first programming language. It empowers users and organizations to tackle complex computing problems with simple, maintainable and robust code.

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Oct 24 2019 at 7:43PM

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What are some alternatives to Elixir and F#?
Golang
Go is expressive, concise, clean, and efficient. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel type system enables flexible and modular program construction. Go compiles quickly to machine code yet has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. It's a fast, statically typed, compiled language that feels like a dynamically typed, interpreted language.
Erlang
Some of Erlang's uses are in telecoms, banking, e-commerce, computer telephony and instant messaging. Erlang's runtime system has built-in support for concurrency, distribution and fault tolerance. OTP is set of Erlang libraries and design principles providing middle-ware to develop these systems.
Clojure
Clojure is designed to be a general-purpose language, combining the approachability and interactive development of a scripting language with an efficient and robust infrastructure for multithreaded programming. Clojure is a compiled language - it compiles directly to JVM bytecode, yet remains completely dynamic. Clojure is a dialect of Lisp, and shares with Lisp the code-as-data philosophy and a powerful macro system.
Ruby
Ruby is a language of careful balance. Its creator, Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto, blended parts of his favorite languages (Perl, Smalltalk, Eiffel, Ada, and Lisp) to form a new language that balanced functional programming with imperative programming.
Rust
Rust is a systems programming language that combines strong compile-time correctness guarantees with fast performance. It improves upon the ideas of other systems languages like C++ by providing guaranteed memory safety (no crashes, no data races) and complete control over the lifecycle of memory.
See all alternatives