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

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

#111

Post by pavel_lishin »

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…

Don't focus on tooling, focus on their complaints about not having enough senior engineers familiar with the language.

We're in a similar boat. I don't know the full history of how we came to use Elixir, but I would wager that early on in the company, someone really loved it and evangelized it. But now, we don't have that many senior people who know it well. I can count the ones I talk to regularly on one hand, and once I run out of fingers, I'm probably sixth place runner up, which makes me very uncomfortable.

That's why I wouldn't suggest Elixir. Unless you're incredibly sure you won't have significant churn for the lifetime of your business, or have money to burn specifically hiring Elixir folks, I wouldn't recommend it.

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

#112

Post by dudul »

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…

Can you name a few of the libraries you didn't find?

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

#113

Post by pavel_lishin »

phtrivier wrote: post #9

It's not argument "against" selecting it (it's a free world, and mileage vary), but a couple of scar-earned advice: - Be careful about libraries. If you know that your system has to interact with X, don't assume that there is a running, idiomatic, maintained libary for X on `hex.pm`. Do a bit of due diligence. We had experience ranging from `meeh` (oauth2, graphql, http) to `pretty bad` (mqtt, swagger.) But as other…

I literally have a Simpsons-Mendoza meme printed out on my desk, except instead of "MENDOZAAAAAA", McBain is screaming "DIALYZEEEEER".

What a god-awful piece of software.

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

#114

Post by joelbluminator »

benwilson-512 wrote: post #47
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…

> Specially now we are using all the hotwire stuff. Maybe I'm missing something, but doesn't this have precisely the same latency characteristics as live view? I do agree that some of the "you don't need redis" and similar are overblown (particularly claims about tasks replacing background jobs), but I think there is truth to these claims in the following sense: Particularly in Rails, Redis gets used not just as a to…

Those advantages are really overblown and not worth the hit in missing libraries or missing hires.

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

#115

Post by pavel_lishin »

minhajuddin wrote: post #48
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…

> We also found many times missing libraries, or found libraries which are incomplete, or unmaintained or just not well documented Can you give some examples here. This may have been true in the past, but isn't true anymore. I can give an example where ruby is lacking: Performant HTTP libraries, Elixir and Erlang are so good in this space, look at `finch`, `httpoison` etc,. there is first class support for HTTP2 and…

> Using dialyzer gives you so much static analysis for free as opposed to the default ruby vscode plugin. I have never heard of complaints about tooling.

ctrl-f for "dialyzer" in this thread, and you will :)

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

#116

Post by dudul »

shepardrtc wrote: post #38

A couple of guys at my company did their first startup using Elixir years ago, but they weren’t devs so they had to contract a company to do it. They regret it now because no one at our company can work on it, and they have to rely on the contractors who charge a lot. Sure someone could learn it, but we’ve got more important things to do. As much as everyone on HN loves it, you’re going to have to work hard to get ot…

> They regret it now because no one at our company can work on it

> Sure someone could learn it, but we’ve got more important things to do

If they can't give you 2 or 3 days to learn a language then they don't regret it that much I guess.

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

#117

Post by whalesalad »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #111
whalesalad wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Don't focus on tooling, focus on their complaints about not having enough senior engineers familiar with the language. We're in a similar boat. I don't know the full history of how we came to use Elixir, but I would wager that early on in the company, someone really loved it and evangelized it. But now, we don't have that many senior people who know it well. I can count the ones I talk to regularly on one hand, and o…

This is not the fault of Elixir. It’s the fault of trigger happy CTO’s who chase shiny new objects without thinking about the long term, big picture. I’ve made plenty of unsexy decisions when my heart was pulling me in a different direction - because it’s the right thing to do based on the team you have or the direction you’re headed.

Adopting Elixir, like Clojure or Haskell or any of the more esoteric languages is a commitment. Don’t do it if the benefits aren’t there or you aren’t willing to make the investment.

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

#118

Post by liveoneggs »

morbicer wrote: post #46
atonse wrote: post #23

We chose elixir in 2016 for our product and never regretted it. Apart from application bugs we’ve caused, it just keeps chugging along and working beautifully. It’s never once been the bottleneck in our stack. Finding people has not been tough at our scale, and they’ve been good quality. We are just scratching the surface with OTP. And between that and the data processing tools, we know we can handle pretty much any…

55 / 2.62 (millions of seconds in a month) ~= 20reqs / second That's not very impressive, you could achieve that easily on something deemed "slow" like Django or RoR But I guess your load is not constant. How many reqs/sec can it handle in the peak time?

to be fair t3.medium is very small for a production deployment ($30/month on-demand) so I read this as having cycles to spare

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

#119

Post by joelbluminator »

minhajuddin wrote: post #48
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…

> We also found many times missing libraries, or found libraries which are incomplete, or unmaintained or just not well documented Can you give some examples here. This may have been true in the past, but isn't true anymore. I can give an example where ruby is lacking: Performant HTTP libraries, Elixir and Erlang are so good in this space, look at `finch`, `httpoison` etc,. there is first class support for HTTP2 and…

The Ruby community is 4x bigger than Elixir and I am being generous to Elixir, and even Ruby is considered smallish.

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

#120

Post by pavel_lishin »

whalesalad wrote: post #117
pavel_lishin wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't focus on tooling, focus on their complaints about not having enough senior engineers familiar with the language. We're in a similar boat. I don't know the full history of how we came to use Elixir, but I would wager that early on in the company, someone really loved it and evangelized it. But now, we don't have that many senior people who know it well. I can count the ones I talk to regularly on one hand, and o…

This is not the fault of Elixir. It’s the fault of trigger happy CTO’s who chase shiny new objects without thinking about the long term, big picture. I’ve made plenty of unsexy decisions when my heart was pulling me in a different direction - because it’s the right thing to do based on the team you have or the direction you’re headed. Adopting Elixir, like Clojure or Haskell or any of the more esoteric languages is a…

> This is not the fault of Elixir.

That's very true. But it's still something to consider, especially for OP who's choosing a new language for a new project.

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