Ask HN: What's your favorite way of getting a web app up quickly in 2018?

These are two separate things: Erlang and Elixir are one, Phoenix is another.

In general, you don't need to know any Erlang to start working with Elixir. In time, as you advance your knowledge and start looking at more advanced features, you'll need the ability to read Erlang at some point, but that's actually pretty trivial: Erlang syntax is one of the simplest/smallest out there. It's much better in this case than it's with Clojure and Java.

The functional nature of Elixir may be a little weird, but, if you're worried about this, it's not taken to the extreme like in Haskell. At the end of the day, you do have a process dictionary (don't use it), and normal IO. It's true for both Erlang and Elixir, but Elixir adds some improvements on top of that: in Elixir, you can re-bind a variable (Erlang has single assignment only), you get the familiar syntax for accessing elements of collections (`coll[:keyname]`), the `if` is "fixed" to be normal if-then-else (the usual Erlang construct is dubbed `cond` in Elixir) and so on. It's FP but in the spirit of OCaml rather than Haskell: pragmatic and striving to be convenient without pulling the users' minds through a monad.

Now, Phoenix is another thing altogether. As far as frameworks go, Phoenix is very well designed, with a couple of orthogonal concepts being composed into a highly functional whole. To be honest, I didn't use Phoenix yet, personally - I did some code review for colleagues, but my own projects are written with Plug for now. Plug is a library which is comparable to WSGI spec in Python plus some additional utils, like in Werkzeug. Phoenix is built on top of Plug, so I figured learning it first is not a bad idea.

Turns out you can get by with Plug (and eventually some "plugs" packages from other people) for quite a while; the experience is like with Flask or Sinatra. You have to know what you want, exactly, but if you do, it's trivial to build a basic framework out of the available plugs. It's actually a strong selling point of the whole tech: as I mentioned, Plug is as much a library as a specification (with the same motivation as WSGI) and it's great for interoperability of components. The whole stack is composable and extensible at the same time, which is not that easy to pull off as far as framework designs go.

Documentation is decent, although its searchability is less so, I had a good time with devdocs.io for the core language and with hexdocs for plugs. It's definitely grokkable, and I'd say worth a try.

I don't know which planet you're living on but all you need to do is search Indeed.com for title:php and you'll find PHP is up there with Java, C# and Javascript in terms of the number of jobs. In some countries Java, JS and PHP are the only languages used in any significant numbers. Likewise in more technologically advanced countries once you get away from the tech hubs. I'm not a fan of PHP and I wish it was true but dead it certainly ain't.

Pythonanywhere and flask, with git used to deploy. Fairly simple and I have not hit any performances or scale issues for any of the minor app apps I have made.

Webpack Express React on top of Google App Engine. I call it Rexpack - https://github.com/bengrunfeld/rexpack

Perl 5 is pulling me like a superstrong magnet. I haven't had time to read the basics and things like choosing the correct sigil + accessor trim me up, but still, it has many niceties. To begin with, you can have a statement "use v5.x;" and be done with which interpreter problem: it can tell you it needs sth. different, and does not fail because you have python3 to be 3.x, but the script needs 3.x+y, or you have the shebang as python3.x but the system has 3.x+y which is compatible, but you can only have one full path in the shebang... Then the context variable $_ is just lovely. The availability of mature libraries for everything is a trait Perl shares with a small number of languages. Its integration to Unix and its expressivity are second to none. The documentation, while not as accessible as Emacs', is available on you computer offline in man pages, and perldoc can give you proper docs on functions (unlike crappy help() in Python which never shows you anything useful and you have to go to the docs, usually online), add to that POD being a very nice way to add documentation to your scripts and also view them (if its in the path you can "perldoc " and get help. And once you know your way around perl* man pages, you can just program independently, with little or no need to go online for Perl stuff. All niceties other languages/communities could've had, but just don't, because, well IDK why.

I'm a 25yo, so when I started programming Perl hatred was the hot thing already. Well, luckily as a curious person I discovered its just baseless cargo cult. Perl is one of the best tools to have in your toolbox.