Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 297 posts

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

#161

Post by cultofmetatron »

poisonta wrote: post #60
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…

In addition to that, I struggled to find a well maintained library similarly to Devise. Also, many people won’t agree to me, but Ecto is also a kind of pain. I think Phoenix would have been in a better position if there were libraries like ActiveRecord and Devise.

I've been able to drop in pow with ease and have everything I would have gotten from devise.

That said, the community is moving towards phx_gen_auth which jose himself wrote and will come out of the box with 1.6

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

#162

Post by BMorearty »

BMorearty wrote: post #149

This question reminds me of a story about Yahoo! Stores, which came out of Yahoo!’s acquisition of Viaweb, cofounded by PG. As he has frequently mentioned, Viaweb was written in Lisp and he felt they got an inherent advantage by using Lisp [0]. Several years after Yahoo! acquired Viaweb I was having lunch with the then-VP in charge of Stores and other business products, who was not from the original Viaweb team. The…

Clarification on my last sentence: it’s not that managers code in languages like Java. It’s that managers have different priorities, such as hiring. In my experience those priorities lead to different technology decisions.

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

#163

Post by svrtknst »

dimgl wrote: post #93

So here's my experience as a hobbyist. I really enjoyed using Elixir when it gained some traction around 2017-2018 and found the language to be beautiful. The documentation is also great. Here's a few reasons why I never kept using it for my own projects. Most of the time Elixir feels like overkill. It's easier to use Node.js or Golang to create simple services or prototypes. The mental overhead of having to go from…

> I would rather have had something closer to Koa

I'd just use Plug then. Not every tool suits every job

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

#164

Post by sb8244 »

I'm very bullish on Elixir as a language, but I temper that with the reality that I don't think it will become a mainstream language (in the next few years, at least).

I picked up Elixir probably 4-5 years ago when a co-worker kept recommending it and wanted to explore it more. We finally got the approval to do a microservice in it that was well-suited for it. Over time it became one of the two "blessed languages" alongside Ruby, and was probably adopted by 40% of teams. Our monolith was still Ruby, so a lot of teams had to use Ruby.

I found that people could pick up the language fairly quickly, but it would take a few stumbles on OTP before things started to click there. People generally seemed to like learning it, though. Maybe they were just being polite.

For me, Elixir has been the most fun I've had programming since I started. It allows me to more consciously design my systems because I don't really feel limited by it—this is why I'm bullish on the language. I enjoyed programming in Ruby, but felt limited to doing things a certain way.

There's also still a ton of opportunity in the community (which is excellent as it is, imo). For example, I wrote a book with Pragmatic that I don't think I would've been able to write in the Ruby world. If you're the type of person who likes exploring, figuring things out, and documenting afterwards, then you could make a nice name for yourself in the community.

Hiring is still a bit rough. If you're trying to scale to 50+ engineers then you're going to need someone skilled in training to bring the team up. Throwing them into the deep end won't work. I think smaller teams should generally not have as big of a problem? I'm curious to see how my former employer will maintain Elixir—grow or shrink adoption—over the next 2 years.

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

#165

Post by josevalim »

KZeillmann wrote: post #136

We tried it and moved away from it. A few reasons - one is IDE support, which has been mentioned in this thread. The other was release configuration. At the time we were working on it, it was more difficult than it should have been to use env variables at runtime (rather than build time). I'm used to the Spring Boot approach - start with having different Spring profiles for different environments, and then let your s…

> Maybe it's better now, but that turned me off a lot to using it.

Sorry to hear KZeillmann! For those wondering, releases - which is one of the ways you package your Elixir project for production - are part of Elixir itself since v1.9 (~2 years ago) and reading secrets from env vars is supported out of the box. Just put the relevant code in the config/runtime.exs file.

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

#166

Post by jolux »

jerf wrote: post #142
jolux wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm confused by the extent to which you believe the things that Erlang/OTP and the BEAM do have been entirely replicated by other ecosystems. I think you're quite right that distributed systems engineering and threaded programming as a whole has moved in the direction of Erlang on a lot of fronts, but I don't really see the parallels (no pun intended) at the language level. Most popular languages still depend on coop…

"I'm confused by the extent to which you believe the things that Erlang and OTP and the BEAM do have been entirely replicated by other ecosystems." One of the reasons I make a bit of an accusation that the people bedazzled by Erlang/Elixir may be not very experienced is that a common take away from the community I have repeatedly noticed is the belief that if another language doesn't have exactly what Erlang has, war…

>One of the reasons I make a bit of an accusation that the people bedazzled by Erlang/Elixir may be not very experienced is that a common take away from the community I have repeatedly noticed is the belief that if another language doesn't have exactly what Erlang has, warts and all, it doesn't have what Erlang has.

On one level yes, they have constructs that you can use to accomplish some of the same goals as the tools Erlang provides, but some people (me) like the specific programming model that Erlang provides for dealing with these problems. The concurrency characteristics of the systems I hack on every day would be much harder to model without GenServers. It's not particularly surprising that Erlang is not the only way to solve a problem in software engineering, there is no silver bullet.

I've written much more C# than I have Elixir in my time as a developer and the fact remains that I prefer functional programming and I like using OTP. I don't see what the "wide variety of other things that are superior" are in languages that aren't Erlang. The ecosystem is stronger and the tooling is better, but those are not intrinsic to the design of the language. Tooling kind of is, with static languages, I suppose. Lack of static types are the one thing that bother me a lot about Elixir.

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

#167

Post by dpeck »

aczerepinski wrote: post #37

I love Elixir. But… Five years ago I spent time learning Elixir on the side thinking I was investing in an upcoming technology that would pay off for me financially. I eventually built some services in Elixir at work and really enjoyed it. They performed well but the language didn’t catch on with the rest of the team. However, five years later the mainstream languages (Ruby, Go) are still paying more. I still get rec…

Looking for increased pay based on programming language used is going to lead to disappointment more often than not. The best thing that anyone can do to increase their compensation is be aligned with a business, or part of a business where they’re a profit center vs a cost center. The language itself is more about a persons preference and the things that you value as far as day to day working experience.

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

#168

Post by 29athrowaway »

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 very productive but it has problems of its own. Many companies move away from Rails once they reach certain growth milestones.

Erlang (and by extension Elixir) is a concurrent language. You use it when you have non-trivial concurrency challenges. When tackling the right problems, the language shines.

Implementing a simple CRUD application with Elixir is overkill, because you can make your servers stateless and delegate most of the concurrency problems to the database.

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

#169

Post by hgershman »

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…

I love Elixir, but even I have to say that the tooling story in IDEs is awful. Using VSCode, ElixirLS is the best extension I've found so far, but even the experience with it makes me want to ditch Elixir entirely more often than not (and no, the number of stars on VSCode marketplace means nothing).

The extension will often just lock up, either giving you no autosuggestions/errors, or refusing to remove errors that you've already resolved, and the only way to fix it reliably is to delete the .elixir_ls/ folder and/or completely close and restart VSCode, both of which require rebuilding the entire dialyzer which is a constant battery killer on laptops. This is such a frequent issue that some days I find myself having to quit/reopen VSCode at least once an hour, and despite spending absurd amounts of time trying to find a long term fix, I've never found one.

Not to mention the issue that has been open for 8+ months where ElixirLS is built using an older version of Elixir, and if you are using a recent version of Elixir for your project (anything newer than 1.9), some of the core functionality of ElixirLS just breaks (autocomplete and hover tips). That issue alone makes me want to ditch ElixirLS (and likely Elixir) entirely.

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

#170

Post by alexcp_ »

yoneyone wrote: post #77
hnedeotes wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably there's no one in the Elixir community with enough know how to build a Devise-alike lib, it's what it is.

Jose Valim, creator Elixir, was one of the core developers of Devise...

That's the joke
Post reply on HN