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0 pointsricketycricket1mo ago0 comments

Here are some thoughts on it from José Valim: https://dashbit.co/blog/why-elixir-best-language-for-ai

LLMs absolutely understand and write good Elixir. I've done complex OTP and distributed work in tandem with Sonnet/Opus and they understand it well and happily keep up. All the Elixir constructs distinct from ruby are well applied: pipes, multiple function clauses, pattern matching, etc.

I can say that anecdotally, CC/Codex are significantly more accurate and faster working with our 250K lines of Elixir than our 25K lines of JS (though not typescript).

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d4mi3n1mo ago

I suspect this is partly due to the quality of documentation for Elixir, Erlang, and BEAM. The OTP documentation has been around for a long time and has been excellently written. Erlang/Elixer doc gen outputs function signatures, arity, and both Elixir and Erlang handle concepts like function overloading in very explicit, well-defined ways.

bnchrch1mo ago

Thats a large reason for sure!

I'd layer in a few more

* Largely stable and unchanged language through out its whole existance

* Authorship is largely senior engineers so the code you train on is high quality

* Relatively low number of abstractions in comparisson to other languages. Meaning there's less ways to do one thing.

* Functional Programming style pushes down hidden state, which lowers the complexity when understanding how a slice of a system works, and the likelyhood you introduce a bug

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