Hacking Devin Torres

Elixir: It's Not About Syntax

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Whenever there’s a discussion about Elixir, it soon becomes apparent that there’s still a lot of confusion regarding it’s purpose. Some developers have it in their heads that Elixir is merely some crazy new syntax that ex-Rubyists are using to avoid writing Erlang. Well, I’m going to try to dispell some of the myths and misconceptions with this blog post.

It’s not about syntax, stupid silly!

In The Excitement of Elixir, I responded to two of the most well-known criticisms of Erlang from real-world developers now that we have Elixir for comparison. I failed to drive home what Elixir truly represented. Elixir is not “just about syntax,” nor is that the only thing Elixir stands for. If Elixir’s goals were a pie chart, a friendlier syntax would represent a sliver of what makes Elixir a worthwhile investment.

The Excitement of Elixir

Tue, 22 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

I’ve been an Erlanger since 2008 and I’m the author of a few Erlang projects of varying usefulness and popularity, including Poolboy. Poolboy is used by Basho in Riak, 2600hz in Kazoo, IRCCloud, ChicagoBoss, and other high profile projects.

Get on with it…

What I’m trying to say is that I’m (hopefully) not an Erlang noob, so with that context in mind I’d like to get this off my chest: programming in Erlang sucks. I’ve built dozens of services in Erlang and written fair amount of Erlang code. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not all bad! My love of pattern matching and polymorphic functions is limitless. However, everything else about Erlang (the language) is clunky and cumbersome. Now for the pitch: Elixir is everything good about Erlang and none – almost none – of the bad. That’s a bold statement, right? Elixir is what would happen if Erlang, Clojure, and Ruby somehow had a baby and it wasn’t an accident.

SproutCore getPath for PHP

Fri, 28 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Helpful SproutCore Binding Transforms

Mon, 31 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000

A Natural Sorting Comparator for JavaScript's Array.prototype.sort

Fri, 25 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000

A Transliterating URL Slugifier in Erlang

Wed, 23 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Turn CSS Rules Into Inline Style Attributes Using jQuery

Wed, 26 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Gmail doesn’t support stylesheets or the style tag, but they allow inline style attributes. This snippet allows the browser to use it’s native facilities for building an HTML email for e.g. marketing campaigns by allowing you to write a document using linked stylesheets or inline style tags in the document. This could either be run within the context of the HTML email template itself or from a parent window that the HTML email is being built within. After the document has loaded and inlined it’s style definitions, the style and script tags that very few email clients support will be removed so you can get the innerHTML of the document and use it later as the HTML portion of your multipart MIME emails.

A JavaScript LRU (Least-Recently-Used) Cache

Fri, 21 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000

JavaScript: The Fastest Dynamic Language?

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I remember programming for the web in the late 90’s. JavaScript engines were a lot worse then than they are now, and it was the last programming skill a programmer mentioned. Many programmers didn’t even regard the language as a real language, much the same way many of us today scoff when somebody mentions HTML as a programming skill. What many didn’t realize, though, is that JavaScript has always been a beautiful language when used correctly.