Ask HN: Are you satisfied with Elixir or do you regret choosing Elixir? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Are you satisfied with Elixir or do you regret choosing Elixir?

#101

Post by losvedir » Tue, May 18, 2021, 1:37 PM UTC

midrus wrote: post #68

ecmascript wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The trick is to use liveview for data that needs to come from the server anyway. I'd guess that the OP did use it for everything, like popups etc and did not do the same with hotwire.

So what's the recommended approach for doing it without liveview in the liveview world? jquery? just document.addEventListener? That's what hotwire gives you: an opinionated approach and a golden path to do things in a manageable way.

There's the so-called "PETAL" stack these days: Phoenix, Elixir, Tailwind.css, Alpine.js, LiveView. In that scenario, you use Alpine.js for the frontend-only stuff.

Re: Ask HN: Are you satisfied with Elixir or do you regret choosing Elixir?

#102

Post by flyingfences » Tue, May 18, 2021, 1:37 PM UTC

darkwater wrote: post #71

gamache wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a bunch but they call the Haskell "Scala" for some reason.

That's make me wonder: what's the "right" pronunciation for Haskell in English? Does it rhyme with Scala?

Depending on accent, I've heard "Haskell" rhyme with either "skull" or "fell".

Re: Ask HN: Are you satisfied with Elixir or do you regret choosing Elixir?

#103

Post by bennyp101 » Tue, May 18, 2021, 1:38 PM UTC

I've used it for a few small production APIs, as well as internal TV dashboard things - and it works great!

There are a few business services that I would eventually like to move to it, but I don't have the time or resources currently. (As much as I like it, it's quite a shift mentally)

Re: Ask HN: Are you satisfied with Elixir or do you regret choosing Elixir?

#104

Post by carlosf » Tue, May 18, 2021, 1:39 PM UTC

midrus wrote: post #31

My company is moving away from it. We built a few services but after a few years some of the original people that introduced it left the company and it became very difficult to hire for. New hires were either people wanting to learn (so we had to spend a good bunch of resources into teaching + end up with a system built by noobs to the language) or very expensive developers with a lot of experience in erlang and elix…

> Most of what you get from elixir in terms of redundancy, high availability, etc you can have that anyway from kubernetes, heroku or any PaaS.... you will need more than 1 server anyway, so...

Yeah, last time I tried to get a hang in Erlang I felt it was trying to solve stuff that is already being solved by my infrastructure in a language agnostic way.

Re: Ask HN: Are you satisfied with Elixir or do you regret choosing Elixir?

#105

Post by ncallaway » Tue, May 18, 2021, 1:39 PM UTC

whalesalad wrote: post #91

midrus wrote: post #31

My company is moving away from it. We built a few services but after a few years some of the original people that introduced it left the company and it became very difficult to hire for. New hires were either people wanting to learn (so we had to spend a good bunch of resources into teaching + end up with a system built by noobs to the language) or very expensive developers with a lot of experience in erlang and elix…

I am bummed out to see that this is the top comment. I don't doubt your experiences but I hope that other people do not latch on to this and use it as a strong argument against using Elixir. All of these complaints are skin deep and kinda petty, to be honest. > Tooling is just terrible. The VSCode plugin is crap, kills the CPU unless you disable features. There is no IDE from jetbrains. This is a bizarre criticism of…

> This is a bizarre criticism of Elxir the language. There are a lot of developers out there who prefer a more lightweight editor and do not want the bells, whistles and crutches of a heavy duty environment.

Right, but...there are also developers out there who do want those things.

It feels very dismissive to dismiss a complaint like that as "petty" just because there's a set of people who don't have the same needs. I feel like it's a very useful piece of information about the language that doesn't feel at all petty to me.

If you don't want the IDE-like tooling, then you can read the comment and think: "ah, they want more tooling than I do, so this critique doesn't apply to my use-case". If you do want that style tooling, then you might read the comment and think: "Ah, that's good to know. That applies to me, and I'll definitely take it into consideration".

Someone having priorities that are different from you doesn't seem "petty" to me. It just seems...like different priorities.

Re: Ask HN: Are you satisfied with Elixir or do you regret choosing Elixir?

#106

Post by aej » Tue, May 18, 2021, 1:41 PM UTC

Having done python for many years and coming to Elixir the things that I find Elixir does really well are:

- mix and the general tooling (package management, testing, deployment)

- iex - specifically being able to run a shell at the same time as running my app. It makes it easy to test and explore code from the REPL

- documentation (both in iex and hexdocs) - Navigating Elixir documentation is standardized and easy

- Immutability - it took a while to get used to but now I wouldn't have it any other way

Re: Ask HN: Are you satisfied with Elixir or do you regret choosing Elixir?

#107

Post by cavalcanti » Tue, May 18, 2021, 1:48 PM UTC

No regrets, Elixir is a great language running in a rock-solid runtime, with such a nice community around it. Recommend that you give it a try.

Re: Ask HN: Are you satisfied with Elixir or do you regret choosing Elixir?

#108

Post by joelbluminator » Tue, May 18, 2021, 1:50 PM UTC

midrus wrote: post #31

My company is moving away from it. We built a few services but after a few years some of the original people that introduced it left the company and it became very difficult to hire for. New hires were either people wanting to learn (so we had to spend a good bunch of resources into teaching + end up with a system built by noobs to the language) or very expensive developers with a lot of experience in erlang and elix…

Rails is awesome nothing comes close to being as fun and productive. Tried php and django, not bad but not Rails.

Re: Ask HN: Are you satisfied with Elixir or do you regret choosing Elixir?

#109

Post by cy_hauser » Tue, May 18, 2021, 1:51 PM UTC

whalesalad wrote: post #91

midrus wrote: post #31

My company is moving away from it. We built a few services but after a few years some of the original people that introduced it left the company and it became very difficult to hire for. New hires were either people wanting to learn (so we had to spend a good bunch of resources into teaching + end up with a system built by noobs to the language) or very expensive developers with a lot of experience in erlang and elix…

I am bummed out to see that this is the top comment. I don't doubt your experiences but I hope that other people do not latch on to this and use it as a strong argument against using Elixir. All of these complaints are skin deep and kinda petty, to be honest. > Tooling is just terrible. The VSCode plugin is crap, kills the CPU unless you disable features. There is no IDE from jetbrains. This is a bizarre criticism of…

> I would never complain about a language just because an IDE does not exist for it.

I think their complaint is valid, especially in light of their finding it difficult to find experienced coders who are in their salary range.

New coders can lean heavily on a good IDE to help: code completion, breakpoints, step wise debugging, one click links to the docs, easy code navigation, and more. Senior coders can and should use the editor of choice, but a great IDE makes a world of difference for a junior or even intermediate coder.

Re: Ask HN: Are you satisfied with Elixir or do you regret choosing Elixir?

#110

Post by dorian-graph » Tue, May 18, 2021, 1:51 PM UTC

I'm at a relatively early stage VC-backed startup and from day 1 it's been written in Elixir. It was a fantastic choice, for many reasons, with some being:

- Elixir is good for just getting stuff done. I came from a previous startup that used Go and Elm.

- The community isn't as small as people make it out to be, or, it's quality over quantity. ;)

- There's a lot of good modules out there, and if you need to write your own, it's easy and there's well-defined patterns. E.g. I recently improved our internal Zendesk client and it was a breeze.

- https://dashbit.co/ for paid support/advice is amazing.

- The console for experimentation, debugging, inspection, etc. is fantastic.

- The let it crash, and other Elixir/Erlang philosophies, have been very helpful.

- There's a solid amount of batteries-included, but not in an overbearing/restrictive way.

- It's such a pleasant day-to-day dev experience.

I didn't know Elixir before joining this startup. For myself, and workmates who also didn't have prior experience, it's been a breeze to get up to speed in.