<story><title>Ten years without Elixir</title><url>http://blog.cretaria.com/posts/ten-years-without-elixir.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mmcclure</author><text>From the perspective of someone coming the other direction (a developer working almost entirely with Elixir that needed to jump to Erlang docs occasionally), it&amp;#x27;s interesting to see the note on docs, and honestly the vibe I get from this blog post feels related to my personal overall gripe with the Erlang community.&lt;p&gt;To be blunt, I really dreaded needing to jump to the Erlang documentation, largely because of a perceived gap in developer empathy. Elixir documentation feels like it&amp;#x27;s written in a way that wants you to be successful and enjoy the process, while Erlang documentation feels very perfunctory. Where Elixir documentation is rife with examples and hints, Erlang documentation almost makes you feel like an idiot for wanting to see similar examples.&lt;p&gt;I wonder how much of that vibe is more due to priming because of community perception more than anything else. There&amp;#x27;s a distinct stereotype of Erlangers having a strong &amp;quot;I am very smart&amp;quot; vibe. That&amp;#x27;s not fair to a lot of the wonderful Erlang fans I&amp;#x27;ve met that are extremely welcoming, but the wider Erlang community has a strong perception of gatekeeping where they almost don&amp;#x27;t seem like they &lt;i&gt;want&lt;/i&gt; the language to be more accessible.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hinkley</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve found that in general the longer someone has been on a project, the worse their documentation is.&lt;p&gt;People who have both deep practical knowledge of a domain and can explain it clearly are so rare that we tend to remember them by name. Experts can bitch all they want about how Neil deGrasse Tyson isn&amp;#x27;t a &amp;#x27;real astrophysicist&amp;#x27;, but lets see you try to talk to the general public, or for that matter, college students starting their senior year as undergrads in your field. Then lets have them frankly rate you on your lack of accessibility, tendency to circular reasoning, overuse of jargon, and complete lack of patience... We&amp;#x27;ll call it the head-up-own-ass quotient.&lt;p&gt;Erlang is a very, very old project, with a historically high degree of echo chamber going on. Without active pushback from a dedicated member of the core team, such things usually end in utter chaos. It is less likely that you will achieve understanding by reading documentation of that sort, than that you will accidentally summon an eldritch horror by reading it aloud and not being very precise with your pronunciation.</text></comment>
<story><title>Ten years without Elixir</title><url>http://blog.cretaria.com/posts/ten-years-without-elixir.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mmcclure</author><text>From the perspective of someone coming the other direction (a developer working almost entirely with Elixir that needed to jump to Erlang docs occasionally), it&amp;#x27;s interesting to see the note on docs, and honestly the vibe I get from this blog post feels related to my personal overall gripe with the Erlang community.&lt;p&gt;To be blunt, I really dreaded needing to jump to the Erlang documentation, largely because of a perceived gap in developer empathy. Elixir documentation feels like it&amp;#x27;s written in a way that wants you to be successful and enjoy the process, while Erlang documentation feels very perfunctory. Where Elixir documentation is rife with examples and hints, Erlang documentation almost makes you feel like an idiot for wanting to see similar examples.&lt;p&gt;I wonder how much of that vibe is more due to priming because of community perception more than anything else. There&amp;#x27;s a distinct stereotype of Erlangers having a strong &amp;quot;I am very smart&amp;quot; vibe. That&amp;#x27;s not fair to a lot of the wonderful Erlang fans I&amp;#x27;ve met that are extremely welcoming, but the wider Erlang community has a strong perception of gatekeeping where they almost don&amp;#x27;t seem like they &lt;i&gt;want&lt;/i&gt; the language to be more accessible.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>eterm</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s like 2000&amp;#x27;s MSDN vs current MSDN.&lt;p&gt;The erlang documentation tells you what you need to know and is accurate but it isn&amp;#x27;t helpful in the way it should be.&lt;p&gt;If you already know what you&amp;#x27;re doing, it can be a useful reference, but it doesn&amp;#x27;t aid understanding.</text></comment>