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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?

#81

Post by iterateoften »

davidthewatson wrote: post #76
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…

It's worth noting that the pattern you describe here is an emergent property of programming languages that changes with the era: http://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html Sadly, the culture of programming language choice in commercial contexts has changed a lot in twenty years, but you can replace python with rust or elixir because programming language choice is a good proxy to understanding insight, intuition, and intell…

Where your argument goes awry is that this discussion is about Elixir. The points you make I did not see happening in the Elixir community so I left even though I was a staunch advocate for years.

Programs are meant to be read by humans. Which is why Python and the bunch are so widely popular across foreign contexts.

Elixir is hard in that context because it introduces a lot of paradigms.

I have had Elixir teams but there is a big big big difference between someone who has done a Phoenix tutorial and someone who understands supervisor trees and genservers.

There are much better languages than Elixir for communicating intention in programs in a way that a junior dev can come in and understand. Especially if you are working with engineers in foreign countries with language barriers.

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

#82

Post by arrowsmith »

rapsey wrote: post #11

For a technology to become widely used it usually needs one or more of these factors when it is released: 1. A big company that adopted it in a major way or created it (Go, Java, React). 2. A very low barrier to entry (Go, node.js, Python). 3. A major leap in productivity compared to alternatives (Ruby+Rails, Python).

I'd argue that, once you've learned how to use them, Elixir/Phoenix absolutely provide #3

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

#83

Post by iterateoften »

pron wrote: post #77
iterateoften wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Large companies like Meta, Google, etc have Rust as part of their official stack. The market cap of companies that have Rust listed is pretty significant compared to Elixir.

Significant compared to Elixir, alarmingly low compared to languages that truly made it. By the way, the moment when large companies start adopting a language is critical. For a language to make it, it must spread like wildfire inside those companies; if it doesn't, that's a huge negative signal to more cautious observers.

Not really, Rust can be 1% of the codebase but by Rusts nature it is implemented the most critical paths.

Rust is insanely awesome for embedding. So you can have Python app that 90% of your team works on and embed Rust for the critical parts to optimize.

But I get your point, however Rust is one of the most discussed programming languages in the past year on HN so it must be doing something right.

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

#84

Post by em-bee »

pmontra wrote: post #72
felideon wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I made a fair amount of money with Phoenix and Elixir and I like them. As a consultant, startup founder, employee?

Consultant.

how do you find your customers? do they use elixir already and need help, or are you doing new projects where you are able to choose/propose elixir to implement it?

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

#85

Post by davidthewatson »

iterateoften wrote: post #81
davidthewatson wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worth noting that the pattern you describe here is an emergent property of programming languages that changes with the era: http://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html Sadly, the culture of programming language choice in commercial contexts has changed a lot in twenty years, but you can replace python with rust or elixir because programming language choice is a good proxy to understanding insight, intuition, and intell…

Where your argument goes awry is that this discussion is about Elixir. The points you make I did not see happening in the Elixir community so I left even though I was a staunch advocate for years. Programs are meant to be read by humans. Which is why Python and the bunch are so widely popular across foreign contexts. Elixir is hard in that context because it introduces a lot of paradigms. I have had Elixir teams but…

Good point. I can relate.

I worked in Ruby on Rails and our particular culture of Rails was not the purity that DHH encourages, but a kind of hipster collection of things like Cucumber, where the intent diverges from reality. That is, we understood the design intent of the DSL barrier-lowering interdisciplinary facade to non-technical people writing tests.

However, that is not what happened in reality. What happened in reality is that only techs wrote Cucumber tests and they struggled mightily with abstractions that had good intent, but bad ROI, given their misapplication.

The constant cacophony of unforeseeable DSL interactions was that team's annoyingly persistent foot-gun postmortem.

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

#86

Post by HerrBertling »

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…

Since I’m coming from the FE side - that’s exactly what is bothering me. I feel like Remix is a good step into the right direction, baking a backend-ish part of the stack into the FE. And crossing the networking gap in an elegant way. I see the same in Phoenix. Well, I guess I’ll fiddle with it for a bit and see if I can even handle the stack at all.

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

#87

Post by emurillo510 »

Arch-TK wrote: post #61

Honestly, after years of writing python I have now gotten to a point where I fear dynamic typing. The fact that Erlang and Elixir do not have static typing, outside of a voluntary type checker, makes me worry about using them. And yes, the approach to error handling in Erlang and Elixir is "let it crash" etc. The runtime debugging tools are excellent. There's approaches to design which ensure that even if there's som…

dynamic typing allows for hot code swaps. which is super important for systems that need 24/7 uptime.

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

#88

Post by endisneigh »

rapsey wrote: post #11

For a technology to become widely used it usually needs one or more of these factors when it is released: 1. A big company that adopted it in a major way or created it (Go, Java, React). 2. A very low barrier to entry (Go, node.js, Python). 3. A major leap in productivity compared to alternatives (Ruby+Rails, Python).

Node.js is all of these, which is why it's one of the most popular stacks.

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

#89

Post by pron »

iterateoften wrote: post #83
pron wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Significant compared to Elixir, alarmingly low compared to languages that truly made it. By the way, the moment when large companies start adopting a language is critical. For a language to make it, it must spread like wildfire inside those companies; if it doesn't, that's a huge negative signal to more cautious observers.

Not really, Rust can be 1% of the codebase but by Rusts nature it is implemented the most critical paths. Rust is insanely awesome for embedding. So you can have Python app that 90% of your team works on and embed Rust for the critical parts to optimize. But I get your point, however Rust is one of the most discussed programming languages in the past year on HN so it must be doing something right.

> however Rust is one of the most discussed programming languages in the past year on HN so it must be doing something right.

That's true. It may even be more discussed here than Haskell was five years ago (though not nearly as hyped as Ruby was 15 years ago). Whether or not that's a good sign is up to interpretation, given that HN doesn't have a good record when it comes to market success and HN hype correlation. That's not surprising given that HN is more Vogue/GQ and less NY Times, i.e. it's less focused on what's happening and more on escapist wishes.

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

#90

Post by pawelduda »

I was a strong Elixir shill for years. I still use it in personal projects (it's very fun) but commercially it never replaced Ruby for me. Here's my quick take:

1) There wasn't large enough gap from typical business perspective that needed to be filled by Elixir.

2) No really big company marketed Elixir. People start shoving microservices/Kubernetes/whatever new tech into any simplest app because Facebook does it. Had it been different, I believe Elixir would explode in popularity.

People here mention that Elixir means higher pay for devs but it was never the case for me. For every Phoenix role there were 5 better paid RoR/Fullstack ones. If I've proven empirically that I can provide value with RoR, why switch? I can derive joy from it by using it on my own project, and from the fact that it's much more fun using any lang on hobby projects than commercial ones.

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