Ask HN: Who regrets choosing Elixir?

Other comments say an engineer is supposed to solve issues with the tools given to them. I can solve issues in other languages, I just don't want to. How does that make me a bad engineer?

The rest--yeah sure, but you can write tests for those things in anything. What you must test is then only a subset of the things that yeah, you do really have to bust your ass to test in an Elixir or a Ruby or a Python, and then it really is boilerplate--just less useful boilerplate overall.

> Best practice is to OpenAPI spec to generate endpoints that you code for.

I disagree with that. Every project where I've ever done that has immediately shat down its leg when the spec of an endpoint changed because refactoring from external sources is bad even in languages where refactoring isn't a disaster from the word 'go'.

IMO, the code is the canonical source of functionality; the spec should reflect it. It's why my CI system for my current project builds new releases of libraries for major languages are pegged to the version of the OAS3 spec being emitted. If you want to go off-road and use a language I don't actively look at, you can still do that, and the semver of the spec (which remains a manual problem in either case, though you could probably get clever enough to make a good guess as to whether it should be major/minor/patch) will tell you as a consumer when you need to upgrade.

A semantically versioned spec is required whether or not you write the spec first or the application first

> But almost every typing zealot I have worked with absolutely hated tests.

Slices both ways pretty easy, tbh. Almost every dynamic-typing pusher I've worked with was an active danger to a project with more than one committer--the best and most effective developers on such projects have always been folks with the requisite fear and acknowledgement of their own fallibility and the absolute danger that comes with using dynamically-typed languages for anything you care about; the starry-eyed Ruby idealists (I had that phase too) are just going to be too clever by half and then you get to eat the resultant shit later.

This might be true based on your specific situation (relatively new to the language, but already know some other varied languages); I don't know.

My biggest annoyance with Elixir is that the ecosystem seems to impose a lot of opinion on how things should be done, and sometimes actively makes it hard to do things differently. In some edge cases I couldn't do the easy thing because it's "wrong", and couldn't do the right thing because it was not yet implemented. I believe this is with good intention and is mainly a side effect of the relatively small and young community, as in many areas the de facto libraries are made by the same few people. I suppose this problem will get better as there are more libraries to choose from and/or more contributors to those libraries.

Another, milder source of annoyance for me is the lack of functional programming features in a functional programming language. To invoke a function that has been passed as a parameter you need a dot. No currying etc. Still, you can get things done and with these limitations it's harder to get yourself into a mess of functions being passed around (but not too hard if you try).

All in all, to me what Elixir brings to the table is more than enough to offset its annoyances. However when it comes to choosing Elixir, I agree with other comments suggesting to choose something the team is comfortable with.

* Healthcare startup that basically outsourced its entire infra/security team from a consulting company. The consultants rewrote everything and took over engineering leadership, basically acting as gatekeepers for anything SRE-related.

* Worked at an older DNS company that hired a bunch of consultants to help engineers migrate their web framework from Play to Spring. Said engineers used Play because it was shiny but didn't have the Scala expertise to keep maintaining it, so they moved to pure Java.