When comparing Brainfuck vs Elixir, the Slant community recommends Elixir for most people. In the question“What is the best programming language to learn first?” Elixir is ranked 9th while Brainfuck is ranked 76th. The most important reason people chose Elixir is:
Leverages the existing Erlang BEAM VM
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Great exercice for your brain
If you ever succeed to use it at least once, whatever it does, you will never be afraid to learn any other programming language.
Pro Very good introduction in geek communities
Say you made a Brainfuck program once, and count how many geeks you will attract.
Pro Designed to challenge and amuse programmers
Rather than have a practical application, Brainfuck is an esoteric language for the purpose of challenging programmers who want to code in a more unusual language.
Pro Great for concurrency
Leverages the existing Erlang BEAM VM
Pro Great getting started tutorials
The tutorials are very clear and concise (even for a person not used to functional programming). Plus they are also very mobile friendly.
Pro Powerful metaprogramming
Write code that writes code with Elixir macros. Macros make metaprogramming possible and define the language itself.
Pro Full access to Erlang functions
You can call Erlang functions directly without any overhead: https://elixir-lang.org/getting-started/erlang-libraries.html
Pro Scalability
Elixir programming is ideal for applications that have many users or are actively growing their audience. Elixir can easily cope with much traffic without extra costs for additional servers.
More details can be found here.
Pro Great as a first functional programming language!
Pro Great documentation
Elixir's documentation is very good. It covers everything and always helps solving any problem you may have. It's also always available from the terminal.
Pro Syntax is similar to Ruby, making it familiar for people used to OOP
All of the benefits of Erlang; without as steep a learning curve of prolog based syntax. Elixir is heavily inspired by Ruby's syntax which many people love.
Pro Easy to download libraries
Comes with built in build tool called "mix". This will automatically download libraries and put them in the scope of the application when you add them to the "deps" function and run mix deps.get
Cons
Con Esoteric language
Brainfuck is by design extremely difficult to use. This makes it un-learnable to beginners.
Con Impractical language, used only as a toy
It won't get you a job. It is not used in any practical application.
Con It's a joke language
Con Almost as bad as Python, but less adopted.
It's a joke, just like Python, but at least brainfuck admits it ;-)
Con R-rated name
It's difficult to talk about in polite company.
Con Deployment is still not as easy as it should be
Con Some design choices may seem strange
Some design choices could have been a little more appealing, for example: using "do...end" comes natural in Ruby for blocks but Elixir uses them for everything and it looks pretty weird:
Enum.map [1, 2, 3], fn(x) -> x * 2 end
or
receive do
{:hello, msg} -> msg
{:world, msg} -> "won't match"
end