You need Beam and the Elixir. I find that really weird, because I'm used to just the language like in Python, Java, C, Rust. Not something underneath it, too.
There is no debugger. The way to debug Elixir is to print stuff to the console, like 40 years ago. No thanks.
> You need Beam and the Elixir. I find that really weird, because I'm used to just the language like in Python, Java, C, Rust. Not something underneath it, too
The beam is a VM. You get that Java requires a VM too right? It’s called JVM for a reason. And Python requires an interpreter.
> There is no debugger. The way to debug Elixir is to print stuff to the console, like 40 years ago.
That is false. https://www.erlang.org/doc/apps/debugger/debugger_chapter.ht... and you have observer. And you have a lot of other debugging tools. I hear Java has a good one and maybe it’s better (I never used it) but it’s not true there exist no debuggers for the beam.
I meant that it doesn't get much love from the community, it's pretty clear it's not used much, that's why things like `dbg` gets added to the language.
If you're going to try and use this analogy, you need to compare Elixir to Kotlin or Scala or Clojure rather than Java. Elixir is a language written for the BEAM which was created for Erlang. The BEAM happened to be useful VM for these other languages such as Elixir, Gleam, LFE, & Luerl.
If you don't want to then fair enough :) that said if your problem is just installation, some of the gleam people realized it can be tricky and made a nice guide for various operating systems and package managers: https://gleam.run/install/
Note this includes installing erlang as well
While it is multiple steps, the frustration is a much more one time thing compared to the problems and frustrations you'd have using a language or its ecosystem for a long time or big project
For Java you need a JRE and JDK depending on whether you're just running or also building. That they are bundled (for Windows) is slightly convenient, but they're not bundled on Linux so what you're saying is OS dependent
Nah, I work on a team that has multiple microservices written over the years in different versions of Java. "Just click the installer" is not sufficient. That's why programs like jenv, SDKman, nvm, and others even exist (and are popular). Your lack of real-world experience is showing.
If you're used to Java, Elixir is like `javac`, Beam is like `java`. Mix is like a (way better) version of Gradle. You need elixir to compile your app, you only need the Beam to run it. Once you've built your project, you don't need Elixir anymore exactly like java/javac. C and rust compile to machine code so don't have a runtime dep, but otherwise they still require you to have a compiler at build time, just like elixir.
To be fair, there is more than just print debugging. You have access to tools like red(x)bug https://github.com/nietaki/rexbug, the Elixir-LS project has Debug Adapter Protocol support. And in my opinion, the REPL (and decent software architecture) makes it easy to investigate your code by just running the functions as needed (even if your live production system if you want).
But then you have all the Erlang libraries for free which is huge. And you add to them the Elixir libraries and that gives you a lot of stuff, just like you get with languages with rich libraries e.g. Java, Ruby, ... I find it reassuring.
Two reasons I put it aside again are:
You need Beam and the Elixir. I find that really weird, because I'm used to just the language like in Python, Java, C, Rust. Not something underneath it, too.
There is no debugger. The way to debug Elixir is to print stuff to the console, like 40 years ago. No thanks.