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Ask HN: Why isn't Phoenix/Elixir more mainstream?

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Re: Ask HN: Why isn't Phoenix/Elixir more mainstream?

#31

Post by john_the_writer »

icedchai wrote: post #21
michaelteter wrote: post #17

In addition to what others have said... There are enough other acceptable languages+frameworks, and two of them (Python and JavaScript) are unfortunately just too visible and in the way. Students, junior developers, and developers from non-CS backgrounds start with what's "easy" and available and talked about (lots of published examples, guides, etc.) Elixir is for those who have experienced other langauges and seek…

The "search for something better" is what drew me to Elixir and Phoenix. I started learning it in my spare time a few months ago. I've been doing web development, in some form, since the 90's (starting with Perl CGI scripts.) I've grown totally tired of the traditional approaches to web app development, especially over the past 10 years as JS frameworks took over, and wanted something different. The runtime (BEAM, Er…

What you'll find though is that FE teams don't care what you're running the api through. And they won't know how to capitalise on the BEAM. They will send you larger and larger requests, and as nice as BEAM works, the bottle neck will aways be the database.

I've seen 8 years of Elixir, and still get asked to return the world when FE wants data. No they won't ask for bits.. They want the user info and the company info for the user, and the client list for the user, and the company details from the client list for the user.. and they want it all in one response. BEAM becomes a useful tool you'll never reach for.

Re: Ask HN: Why isn't Phoenix/Elixir more mainstream?

#32

Post by toyg »

pron wrote: post #24
sph wrote: post #7

These things take time. Do you expect such a new language to be adopted by 90% of developers? Elixir 1.0 was released 9 years ago. Most people use C, Python, Java which have been around for 30+ years. I use Elixir full time but I know I'm on the bleeding edge compared to the vast majority of developers, let alone corporations which operate and change over longer timescales, and Elixir is a major paradigm shift compar…

With few exceptions, languages reach the ballpark of their all-time high relatively quickly, i.e. it is rare that a language doubles its market share (assuming it's not in the vicinity of zero) after its first decade and rarer still that it doubles it after 15 years (I think Python is the only exception to that). In other words, if you're not at 5% market share by age 10, chances are low you'll ever reach 10%. I thin…

IMHO there is a substantial distinction to be made, when running statistics, between languages that are effectively corporation-sponsored (Java, C#, JS, etc) and opensource "community" languages (Perl, Python, C, etc).

The former tend to peak early, powered by marketing departments, and then slowly tail off; the latter tend to do the opposite, because word-of-mouth is slow; community-powered peaks are often determined more by the appearance of a successful product based on it (Rails, Elixir, etc) than time from creation.

Re: Ask HN: Why isn't Phoenix/Elixir more mainstream?

#33

Post by john_the_writer »

LanceH wrote: post #26
FigurativeVoid wrote: post #16

I think a few things are happening. First, the language paradigm pendulum seems to be swinging back towards the middle. Second, and perhaps more impactful, Ruby on Rails is having a bit of a renaissance.

I've worked with multiple companies which have re-embraced RoR. Mostly B2B which prefer the rapid development over the fancy UI something like React might have.

I've seen a blend here. Some react mixed into the RoR. Given trubo though.. I've seen this less. Mostly where there's a bespoke FE and BE team. Then rails just wins on dev time.

Re: Ask HN: Why isn't Phoenix/Elixir more mainstream?

#34

Post by john_the_writer »

atonse wrote: post #19
brigadier132 wrote: post #14

Here is why I think it's not more mainstream 1. The really cool and differentiated aspects of elixir require specialized deployments. Cloud vendors are optimized for stateless horizontally scalable infrastructure not stateful infrastructure. 2. Elixir is a functional programming language and this means you cannot mutate variables. While I like many aspects of elixir, not being able to mutate state makes elixir unsuit…

I disagree with the "require" specialized deployments – we have hosted our elixir apps for years as stateless web apps, just like any other architecture. In fact, you can build a release that's just a zip file which also contains the full elixir/erlang runtimes, that can be deployed on a barebones server (assuming the same libc, etc). It's not "single-executable" nice like Go/Rust/.NET but it's much simpler than it u…

Just losing the while loop was a big one for me. I miss it often. I know the cost of calling something recursively. It's never going to be as cheep as a while loop.

Re: Ask HN: Why isn't Phoenix/Elixir more mainstream?

#35

Post by icedchai »

john_the_writer wrote: post #31
icedchai wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "search for something better" is what drew me to Elixir and Phoenix. I started learning it in my spare time a few months ago. I've been doing web development, in some form, since the 90's (starting with Perl CGI scripts.) I've grown totally tired of the traditional approaches to web app development, especially over the past 10 years as JS frameworks took over, and wanted something different. The runtime (BEAM, Er…

What you'll find though is that FE teams don't care what you're running the api through. And they won't know how to capitalise on the BEAM. They will send you larger and larger requests, and as nice as BEAM works, the bottle neck will aways be the database. I've seen 8 years of Elixir, and still get asked to return the world when FE wants data. No they won't ask for bits.. They want the user info and the company info…

I hear ya. I'm mainly looking at it for smaller projects (micro-SaaS, 2-to-3 people sorta stuff), not anything with a large team.

Re: Ask HN: Why isn't Phoenix/Elixir more mainstream?

#37

Post by signa11 »

iterateoften wrote: post #30

I have been a big advocate for Elixir for 5 years before switching off. My takeaways: love José Valim and the team and the libs they produce. The team is always humble and helpful and produces high quality content in both code and documentation. Why I stopped using Elixir: I was using Elixir obsessively as a performance chasing tool, but then it just didn’t fill the gap properly: 1. Python (or other massively used la…

> Elixir has very few engineers to source from.

this : http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html comes to mind.

Re: Ask HN: Why isn't Phoenix/Elixir more mainstream?

#38

Post by elicksaur »

john_the_writer wrote: post #29

It's not really filling a void. Rails and Python have a answer to the same issue, and more libraries available to them. Also. (and I spend 90% of my time as a paid elixir dev). It's an ugly language that makes you roll your own on so much. Migrations require you change the schemas, and you have schema modules and access modules. The elixir docs are a mess of assumptions and there's no consistency. The number of times…

> Enum.map returns a list which is not an array but is represented in the language as an array

What do you mean by this?

Re: Ask HN: Why isn't Phoenix/Elixir more mainstream?

#39

Post by achenet »

I'm not super experienced with Elixir/Phoenix, but I did notice the documentation was rather disappointing when I tried to learn it, compared to Rust. I kept trying to find a tutorial for a basic web app with Phoenix, everything I could find was for an older version which wasn't compatible with/had different names and locations for the various files than the version I had. Kinda blocked me from getting more into it.
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