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Would you still pick Elixir in 2019?

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Re: Would you still pick Elixir in 2019?

#41

Post by bicx »

therealmarv wrote: post #39

Elixir is a niche (that's the truth). Also in the article it is written 'Relatively difficult to "recruit" developers with existing experience in Elixir'. Why would a SW company invest in niche languages where the resources (software developers) are really expensive and really hard to get? Technologically it's all great but economically that's a nightmare.

If you have a solid background in software development, it's not too hard to become proficient in Elixir in a few weeks. If you recruit good talent with a demonstrated proficiency and willingness to learn, you will be fine. If you need to switch languages or systems in the future, these devs will still be of great use to you.

Re: Would you still pick Elixir in 2019?

#42

Post by jmknoll »

faitswulff wrote: post #18

If the erratically emphasized text bothers anyone else, you can get rid of it by running the following JS in console: document.querySelectorAll('em').forEach(el => el.replaceWith(new Text(el.innerText)))

Great, thank you. I have no idea what the author was trying to achieve there, but it made the article really difficult to read

Re: Would you still pick Elixir in 2019?

#43

Post by sb8244 »

therealmarv wrote: post #39

Elixir is a niche (that's the truth). Also in the article it is written 'Relatively difficult to "recruit" developers with existing experience in Elixir'. Why would a SW company invest in niche languages where the resources (software developers) are really expensive and really hard to get? Technologically it's all great but economically that's a nightmare.

I have been involved with bringing it to my company as the primary proponent. The truth is it hasn't been hard to teach people it and they can produce decent code pretty quickly and good code a bit longer than that but still acceptable.

We have found a few people who knew it already and were looking for a job, but that is fairly rare. Instead, we know we can bring people up to speed on it quickly and also it signals to people that we're willing to give them some language options (Ruby or Elixir) within some boundaries. Having these options is good for ownership of an area.

Re: Would you still pick Elixir in 2019?

#44

Post by forty »

symboltoproc wrote: post #17

The JavaScript Fatigue argument is not good. There's simply no data that backs it and nobody is forced to use new libraries only because they use JavaScript. I've seen third party dependencies churn on Elixir as well (packages that are no longer maintained or alternatives that are better) - I think it's an inherent problem with using dependencies and has nothing to do with the programming language in which those depe…

> nobody is forced to use new libraries only because they use JavaScript.

It's not completely true IMO for 2 reasons: 1- the nodejs standard lib is quite poor compared to say, Java's, Scala's or python's, so you generally need quite a lot of modules to do anything 2- the npm ecosystem is much more amateur. To do anything you have a ton of poorly supported by hobbyists or not supported at all modules. This can force you to change modules/libs regularly. This is to be compared to the Java ecosystem for example, were more people are working together to build well supported/high quality libs (Apache libraries for example)

Re: Would you still pick Elixir in 2019?

#45

Post by davydog187 »

cjhanks wrote: post #38

I guess I feel like the annoying formatting is indicative of the community, immature. Web developers seem to follow trends; Perl -> DJango|RoR -> Node.JS -> Scala -> GoLang -> Elixir -> Something. Or, something like that. To me, it's like buying a $500 pencil and expecting that you should be capable of writing a better book. If you get in bed with that crowd, don't expect that your program and 3rd party dependencies…

Let’s not generalize the community over one blog post. The Elixir community has been very mature in my experience.

Re: Would you still pick Elixir in 2019?

#46

Post by qaq »

Depends on the project. I have a project that heavily relies on headless chrome for scraping dynamic pages I'd rather stick to Node and Puppeteer for this particular project. In general Elixir is a joy to use but some of the trade-offs BEAM(Erlang VM) makes might not match your requirements e.g. if you don't need live code upgrades but project could benefit from static typing you might want to consider something else.

Re: Would you still pick Elixir in 2019?

#47

Post by therealmarv »

bicx wrote: post #41
therealmarv wrote: post #39

Elixir is a niche (that's the truth). Also in the article it is written 'Relatively difficult to "recruit" developers with existing experience in Elixir'. Why would a SW company invest in niche languages where the resources (software developers) are really expensive and really hard to get? Technologically it's all great but economically that's a nightmare.

If you have a solid background in software development, it's not too hard to become proficient in Elixir in a few weeks. If you recruit good talent with a demonstrated proficiency and willingness to learn, you will be fine. If you need to switch languages or systems in the future, these devs will still be of great use to you.

Ok, that sounds good. My overall experience is only for most companies (I'm working as a contractor for many years) that they don't really want to invest in you. Either you fit for the job or not (and competition is not easy sometimes).

Re: Would you still pick Elixir in 2019?

#48

Post by cuddlecake »

I love Elixir.

It's the first language I genuinely enjoy reading and writing even in my private life.

If I wonder about the internals of a library I use, I can just look into the code and kind of understand what's happening. Never had that with JS or anything.

I'm just a genuine fanboy.

Only drawback I feel is: Some libraries that would have been quite developed in JS are not that well developed in Elixir. Some libraries are quite dead and it's hard to find alternatives (mostly obscure stuff)

But on the other hand, it often seems manageable to just write it yourself, or fork it and move on.

Re: Would you still pick Elixir in 2019?

#49

Post by qaq »

nixpulvis wrote: post #35

Tangent: It's proposed that Elixir has better error handling than Rust... but this doesn't sit well with me, and I know the Rust community is in flux here as well. I personally like not having exceptions. It's very easy to trace where an error is coming from when it's a value like anything else. Yea it might be a bit more typing... this is the conflict. Rust does have an issue with the boilerplate involved with writi…

? OTP and Supervisers give you powerful tools for building fault tolerant apps but at the lang level it would be hard to argue that Elixir has better error handling

Re: Would you still pick Elixir in 2019?

#50

Post by atonse »

From a technology perspective, a thousand times yes. And the same for Ember JS (my other go-to).

But from a talent and recruiting perspective, I'm less enthusiastic. Elixir, yes, there's growing talent. But Ember, boy it seems like nobody is doing it, and I've had to convince potential candidates that it'll be worth their time for future employability to learn Ember.

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