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

> Tooling is just terrible. The VSCode plugin is crap, kills the CPU unless you disable features. There is no IDE from jetbrains.

This is a bizarre criticism of Elxir the language. There are a lot of developers out there who prefer a more lightweight editor and do not want the bells, whistles and crutches of a heavy duty environment. I would never complain about a language just because an IDE does not exist for it.

Tooling in Elixir is really some of the best I have ever used as far as the consistency had with mix, hex, hexdocs, etc...

> Also, I've read some comments where people mention "we don't need redis", "we don't need workers" everything is so much easier.

You can still use all the same battle tested tools with Elixir... but it is true that there are lots of situations where those things are genuinely not needed thanks to some of the things that come out of the box on BEAM.

I really enjoyed using Elixir when it gained some traction around 2017-2018 and found the language to be beautiful. The documentation is also great. Here's a few reasons why I never kept using it for my own projects.

Most of the time Elixir feels like overkill. It's easier to use Node.js or Golang to create simple services or prototypes. The mental overhead of having to go from an imperative language to a functional one is high. Once I had paid that cost and gotten over the learning curve, I found it exhausting to write and didn't really feel like I was getting a lot of value.

Take BEAM processes and supervision trees for instance. Almost all of my projects are containerized, split into different services, and have some kind of redundancy on top. When I was deploying Node.js projects onto VPSs I almost always used Docker, systemd, or pm2. Once I started working with AWS regularly, I was using ECS and Lambda for everything. The ability to easily create discrete services and have redundancy for those services meant that I didn't really get a lot of value from having this single Elixir instance that is responsible for many things.

Take ETS: when I started using Elixir, I already had years of experience using Redis and preferred it to most in-memory data stores. I tried to give ETS a shot but found myself wanting the Redis API over and over. Thankfully, the Redix library was excellent and had great support for almost all Redis features, but it always felt like I was using Elixir incorrectly by not utilizing ETS.

Some other points that have already been iterated in other comments:

* Packages are very hit or miss. Sometimes a package will only have an Erlang counterpart and coding efficiently becomes harder if you don't know or understand Erlang well

* The IDE tooling is also hit or miss :( It sucks when your IDE starts to freeze or doesn't understand how to autofill certain things

* Environment configuration is kind of a pain. In the beginning it was really hard to tell what the initial starting point of my application was and how to feed in configuration values to those different parts of my app. I wish this part of Elixir was easier.

* Phoenix was just too much. It always felt like a massive framework and I would rather have had something closer to Koa (Node.js) or Mux (Golang).

I regret "Elixir" the language itself. I feel they should have added a few more features to Erlang, like module parameters, and not bothered with Elixir.

It makes "Erlang" look superficially like Ruby and gets people who are ill-prepared to understand the Erlang mindset into the Erlang community.

It's an amazing language but it's hard to hire for. I wouldn't want to pay someone the kind of money I get paid for it.