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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?

#81

Post by pera »

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…

I strongly disagree with your generalisation regarding the tooling: Mix and Hex are without any doubt some of the most pleasant tools I have ever used. (I personally don't care about IDEs so can't comment on the lsp implementation or idea plugins)

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

#82

Post by scottmessinger »

We adopted it 4 years ago and love it.

As for training people, I taught my non-technical co-founder Elixir for some backend scripts he needed to write. He found it much simpler to pick up then Javascript or Ruby and his code was idiomatic rather quickly.

As for the IDE support in VSCode, I've found ElixirLS[1] great. I do have to restart it sometimes (delete the .elixir_ls folder), but that's a small cost to pay for a pretty great experience.

After spending years in RoR in multiple code bases, I find Elixir code bases to be easier to debug and libraries easier to grok. Without the mutable state of OOP, I don't find myself asking, "Where is this state coming from and when/how was it set?" Of course, macros can be hard to follow, but I still find an Elixir library more straight forward than a Ruby one.

We've also experience the great performance and reliability shared by others on this

We haven't had difficulty finding the right libraries even though the ecosystem isn't as mature as Ruby or Javascript.

[1] https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=JakeBeck...

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

#83

Post by [deleted] »

jcelerier wrote: post #51
morbicer wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

55 / 2.62 (millions of seconds in a month) ~= 20reqs / second That's not very impressive, you could achieve that easily on something deemed "slow" like Django or RoR But I guess your load is not constant. How many reqs/sec can it handle in the peak time?

> 55 / 2.62 (millions of seconds in a month) ~= 20reqs / second I'm pretty sure Java 1.0 running on an Amiga could handle that...

[deleted]

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

#84

Post by devoutsalsa »

applepple wrote: post #66

Functional programming is OK up to a certain degree of complexity... Good if you have a lot of junior developers on your team because it prevents certain kinds of mistakes which juniors tend to make. But many FP projects end up becoming a giant pile of spaghetti code eventually. I think this is because FP doesn't put emphasis on separation of concerns like OOP does. FP advocates separating state from logic as being m…

OOP also leads to spaghetti code. Everything turns into a steaming pile of crap if you don’t work to avoid that reality.

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

#85

Post by [deleted] »

pselbert wrote: post #62
atonse wrote: post #23

We chose elixir in 2016 for our product and never regretted it. Apart from application bugs we’ve caused, it just keeps chugging along and working beautifully. It’s never once been the bottleneck in our stack. Finding people has not been tough at our scale, and they’ve been good quality. We are just scratching the surface with OTP. And between that and the data processing tools, we know we can handle pretty much any…

Running 75 million jobs a year would be totally fine. Depending on the configuration and load Oban easily runs thousands of jobs a second, and 75 million breaks down to less than 3 a second. I’d argue it’s worth the switch, but I’m highly biased!

[deleted]

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

#86

Post by shakow »

I have been using it for my (modestly sized) first serious public project (https://github.com/domovikapp/domovik-server/), and I have been quite satisfied with it.

For the pluses:

- the development experience is stellar (live code reload, REPL interacting directly with the running server, excellent debugger, dependencies management & build system are good and can be extended in the language itself);

  - the integrated documentation generator is of high quality;

  - the performances are satisfactory (you'll get more out of a $10/m VPS with Elixir/Phoenix than with RoR);

  - deployment is surprisingly easy with the releases system;

  - the language itself is quite pleasing;

  - the standard library is very well designed and architectured, and everything just fall in place together;

  - Ecto shows brilliantly how to combine high-level, ORM-like operations and low-level, close-to-the-SQL ones;

  - Phoenix itself is a very well though out framework.
For the cons:

  - the ecosystem is still quite young and has some sharp edges and/or missing docs; 

  - the OTP is magic for heavily parallel workloads, but it is also quite foreign and there will be some work to grasp its inner workings;

  - there are some quirks in the language coming from the Erlang runtime; 

  - I would love to have a static type system, although I see how it would conflict with the tenets of the OTP.
So all in all I might not recommend it for a very high stakes project; but otherwise, just go for it, it's great.

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

#87

Post by oldprogrammer2 »

salex89 wrote: post #17

Nice question, I'm just starting with Elixir for a side project. Has anyone else find it to have a steep learning curve? Coming from Java/Scala and Python, I find it harder to wrap around then Scala was years ago. Shortcuts with mix like mix phx actually make it a bit more complicated for me because I'm used to understanding what is exactly happening under the hood.

My biggest hurdle was being too impatient to learn how to code with immutable data. I banged my head on the desk for two days to get through what I felt was a trivial problem (something with updating files in S3), which I eventually rewrote in python in less than an hour.

Immutability (and the resulting maintainability and predictability) is really appealing to me, though. When I try it again, I think I'll focus on educating myself around the language upfront and not just learning as I go.

Everything else about the language, Phoenix, and the tooling was really nice.

For the same reasons as others have said, I would not pick Elixir for a business, though.

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

#88

Post by udfalkso »

I still love it a few years in. Every project I've used it on has worked really nicely with low resource usage and close to zero maintenance. Switching from RoR to Phoenix/Elixir takes some learning, mostly due to the switch to functional programming, but it's worth it imo. Everything becomes so easy to reason about, test, debug, etc. You'll learn a lot from it and become a better developer in general even when going back to ruby/python afterward.

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

#89

Post by jswny »

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…

It astounds me how much I hear about the “VSCode extension uses all my CPU” thing.

Yes, the extension uses a ton of CPU for 15 minutes the first time you set it up. It’s building a giant database for type information to give you type checking and hints.

It does this ONE TIME when you first set it up. It explains this. It’s really not a big deal. I’ve found the extension to be great, I’m not really sure what you are referring to there.

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

#90

Post by jswny »

phtrivier wrote: post #9

It's not argument "against" selecting it (it's a free world, and mileage vary), but a couple of scar-earned advice: - Be careful about libraries. If you know that your system has to interact with X, don't assume that there is a running, idiomatic, maintained libary for X on `hex.pm`. Do a bit of due diligence. We had experience ranging from `meeh` (oauth2, graphql, http) to `pretty bad` (mqtt, swagger.) But as other…

What you said about releases is somewhat true, but I’d like to clarify.

It has absolutely changed a decent amount over the last few years. Because it used to suck. It’s not really in flux, more like being improved because everyone knew it sucked. It’s in a much better state now and I’m very happy with it where I wasn’t before.

Also, I would say that “in flux” isn’t a proper characterization because it was always backwards compatible. Nothing broke, they just improved the experience through better methods.

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