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Add to SafariWhen comparing CFML 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 CFML is ranked 73rd. The most important reason people chose Elixir is:
Leverages the existing Erlang BEAM VM
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Rapid application development
Get a web app up and running fast with stuff built right in to CFML! Frameworks make it even faster but lengthen the learning curve.
Pro Easily query a database
Newcomers can use an html-like syntax to query a database. Advanced developers can use a scripted syntax to execute stored procedures.
Pro Multiple engine implementations available
There are multiple engine implementations available including Adobe ColdFusion, Lucee, New Atlanta BlueDragon, Railo, and Open BlueDragon among others.
Pro Quick document and image manupulation
ColdFusion can quickly interact with PDFs , Spreadsheets to read/manipulate the data. There are a lot of built in functions to manipulate images quickly.
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 Little actual use either in academia or professionally
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