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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?

#241

Post by rhizome31 »

jerf wrote: post #196
klelatti wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But in 2021, you can do not just "better" than Erlang for all of them, you can do much better. Really appreciate the effort that you've put into this post but it's 99% saying you can do better but without examples of stacks that would be better. For those who don't have your knowledge could you provide some examples?

The core insight of Erlang is that having lots of little processes communicating over a message bus is a great way to design code. It also proves by demonstration a statement that many programmers, especially in the past decades, would have found hard to believe, that you can structure code as a whole bunch of relatively small self-contained services. Many programmers, perhaps even today, would not believe how far yo…

Sure, you can achieve what Elixir does by combining a bunch of different components replicating its features, all with their different execution schemes, configuration syntax, deployment constraints. That's the whole point of Elixir, it gives you an integrated environment to do these things with consistent vocabulary, documentation and deployment strategies.

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

#242

Post by michaljanocko »

CJPoll wrote: post #215

I've been a senior or staff engineer at several companies companies that have their backend tech stacks either primarily or entirely in Elixir. Two of those companies are now unicorns, Divvy (my current company) and Podium. I've seen elixir work great for small teams (~10-15 engineers total) and scale for that company as it went to 100-200 engineers. Engineers at both unicorn companies consider Elixir one of the reas…

Can I ask what HTTP library did you end up with? Thanks.

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

#243

Post by syspec »

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…

> Tooling is just terrible. The VSCode plugin is crap, kills the CPU unless you disable features. There is no IDE from jetbrains. There is a plugin but last time I tried it, it was even worse than the VSCode plugin.

That's my main blocker, proper JetBrains IDE support just makes everything so much easier. I need a debugger.

I tried the plug-in, and kudos to the author but it did not work for me. In the end they're only one person so of course they could not test every single configuration

-

I wonder why JetBrains has not put their weight behind it.

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

#244

Post by joelbluminator »

ricketycricket wrote: post #238
joelbluminator wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am free to say what I want about Elixir, I make it no secret. It got most of its (now faded) hype by trashing Ruby, which rubbed me the wrong way. I genuinely believe Elixir is an unsmart career choice , my feelings about Elixir aside. Without a big corporate backing it and never making it into the top 20 languages during it's peak (which is now passed) there is only one way - down. It has nothing to do with Elixir…

Joel, I wish you'd stop appearing in every popular Elixir post's comments to say something bad about the language or ecosystem. You've admitted in previous discussions that you've never even used Elixir, so why even comment on a post asking about personal development experiences with the language? >It got most of its (now faded) hype by trashing Ruby, which rubbed me the wrong way. It's a programming language, not a…

I don't think I'm gonna stop soon, sorry. For one I really do think Elixir is a horrible career choice and I wanna save young average developers who still have time to correct that mistake (the superstars will do fine no matter what). And second every time I see "Elixir is better Ruby" I get more and more pissed off. If I ever stop reading those things I may slow down about Elixir but you guys just keep me going.

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

#245

Post by midrus »

hnedeotes wrote: post #233
alluro2 wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was stumped when I saw it just now. What the heck...I guess the next thing, an amazing breakthrough, is going to be Alpine.scss style="background-color:$red-secondary;font-weight:bold"

I don't use alpine, but isn't that the blessed way of doing it in React/Vue/etc? I thought they were the ones introducing both @handlers on elements and JSX styling

Maybe, except in React you have a huge community, formatters, linters, editors, testing tools/libraries and an overall architecture for doing things. Alpine seems worse than just using jQuery. I'd prefer to use something like Unpoly before using this monstrosity.

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

#246

Post by midrus »

29athrowaway wrote: post #168
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 a…

In my personal experience (the last bunch of companies I've been at) that milestone you mention is more like what is the current fashion and what the new hires want to work on because of the latest blog post they've read.

At my previous job we had *ALL* of them. Each service or project you opened you could guess the date it was started because of how it was built. Rails -> Node -> Elixir -> Go -> Next.js and the frontend backbone -> ember -> react (redux -> mobx -> rxjs -> [some other random state lib] -> just context! -> recoil) -> typescript and probably by now they're already using whatever the new trend is by this morning. It is insane.

None of the companies needed any of the performance provided by this tools, in fact, they all struggle with developer productivity more than any other metric, and every time they switch to the new shiny toy, productivity takes another huge cut. But hey, people get paid anyway at the end of the month, so let's keep playing.

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

#247

Post by pmontra »

dugmartin wrote: post #172
pmontra wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I write very few fragments and many more raw queries. No ORM is worth the trouble of going too deep into the rabbit hole of learning for the nth time how to write SQL in X.

It is tempting to just drop down to raw queries but then when I read about things like composable Ecto queries ( https://medium.com/flatiron-labs/how-to-compose-queries-in-e... ) it makes me want to stay at the higher abstraction level. The final example in that post: EctoCars.Car |> EctoCars.Car.with_color("blue") |> EctoCars.Car.with_transmission("automatic") |> EctoCars.Car.with_engine_horse_power(200) |> EctoCars…

Yes, we use that pattern in the Elixir project I'm working on. But that's a simple query despite all the JOINs. It's just a waste of time to convert complex queries into Ecto. Maybe the reason is that I build them in the database using it as a REPL. Then I have working SQL and a lot of hard work to turn them into Elixir. Or Ruby, or Python or whatever. I played that game for far too long. I give up immediately now, write raw SQL and move on to the next productive task.

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

#248

Post by goodplum »

joelbluminator wrote: post #244
ricketycricket wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Joel, I wish you'd stop appearing in every popular Elixir post's comments to say something bad about the language or ecosystem. You've admitted in previous discussions that you've never even used Elixir, so why even comment on a post asking about personal development experiences with the language? >It got most of its (now faded) hype by trashing Ruby, which rubbed me the wrong way. It's a programming language, not a…

I don't think I'm gonna stop soon, sorry. For one I really do think Elixir is a horrible career choice and I wanna save young average developers who still have time to correct that mistake (the superstars will do fine no matter what). And second every time I see "Elixir is better Ruby" I get more and more pissed off. If I ever stop reading those things I may slow down about Elixir but you guys just keep me going.

I have read your comments in this thread and your remarks push me more away from Ruby/Rails than Elixir/Phoenix. My first thought was: "wow, some Ruby developers are so insecure about their tech stack that they feel they must criticize other technologies in programming forums to get by". It looks very unprofessional and immature. So think carefully on what you want to achieve, because if your goal is to drag another programming language through the mud, you might drag yours in the process instead.

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

#249

Post by dorian-graph »

klohto wrote: post #141
dorian-graph wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Admittedly it's more or less London-based at the moment, unfortunately! Which timezone are you in?

Currently, with summertime, it would be GMT+2. Not far from UK, CZ :)

I'd say reach out, with the likely caveat that the response may be non-remote for now (I personally fully support remote work). We could hopefully reach out in the future too?

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

#250

Post by ecmascript »

midrus wrote: post #245
hnedeotes wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't use alpine, but isn't that the blessed way of doing it in React/Vue/etc? I thought they were the ones introducing both @handlers on elements and JSX styling

Maybe, except in React you have a huge community, formatters, linters, editors, testing tools/libraries and an overall architecture for doing things. Alpine seems worse than just using jQuery. I'd prefer to use something like Unpoly before using this monstrosity.

Then don't use it, no one is forcing you man. Just because it is not for you doesn't mean its bad or that other people can't have use for it.

You don't really need to use alpine either if you use Phoenix with Liveview, you can probably get away with just using vanilla js if all you really need is some small functionality of modals popping up etc.

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