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Would you still pick Elixir in 2019?

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Re: Would you still pick Elixir in 2019?

#61

Post by thedoops »

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…

Different tools for different jobs. Rust is more of a systems language for close to metal performance and memory safety. Elixir is memory safe from a functional perspective utilizing the actor model. Elixir is good for real time concurrency and higher level systems.

Re: Would you still pick Elixir in 2019?

#62

Post by diminish »

I wouldn't pick Elixir because:

Rails has revolutionized web application development on Ruby, with Sinatra as the minimalist version and a lot of "me too" frameworks have been developed, and somehow I like them all.

* On Python, Django and Flask * On Elixir, Phoenix * On Crystal, Amber * On Javascript Express js for Sinatra. But on JS we didn't get a successful Rails clone, but a storm of front end frameworks, finally Vue JS/React and endless others.

I wouldn't pick Elixir because The world is elsewhere: My choice is on JavaScript ES6, Vue, and a simple Express.js, Sinatra, Flask for most projects.

Re: Would you still pick Elixir in 2019?

#63

Post by latch »

mooreds wrote: post #57

If you are coming to elixir from a rails background, how does it compare? I looked a year or two ago and the number of packages was far smaller with elixir, which turned me off of it.

I think Elixir is quick to learn, long to master. You start off building web apps in Phoenix, being relatively productive from the start, and thinking to yourself "well, there's definitely some magic I don't understand, but this feels a lot like Ruby." You'll immediately notice and learn the smaller differences (immutability and pattern matching).

Then one day, you'll need to store and mutate data in process. And then you'll learn about GenServers and Supervisors.

Then one day, you'll want to have some base functionality but for whatever reason, composition isn't a good fit, so you'll start to dig into macros.

Fundamentally, Go is much more Ruby-like than Elixir (Ruby and Go have shared heap, global GC, array-based data structures, same evaluation strategy, mutability, ...). Elixir is very different. But it's discoverable.

Re: Would you still pick Elixir in 2019?

#64

Post by thedoops »

phtrivier wrote: post #58

Elixir has great things "of his own": * the syntax is well though-of (`with`, destructuring, `|>` are powerful * message passing has great use-cases And then it has problems that are not necessarily "elixir-y", but are there nonetheless: * it's hard to model an application around the Actor model. It's very easy to abuse it. * it's hard to maintain / refactor a large application without help from the compiler before r…

I've found CQRS and DDD designs fit well with OTP and elixir. The actor model with pattern matching ends up cutting away a lot of the classical OOP DDD details.

The issue I see is carryover from other ecosystems taking paradigms that aren't necessary and don't fit into libraries and patterns. It feels like there are still conventions to settle on.

Re: Would you still pick Elixir in 2019?

#65

Post by cjhanks »

sb8244 wrote: post #40
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…

A lot of individuals I've seen in the community so far haven't been the type to quickly jump onto a trend. People have been thoughtful with their application design and have chosen Elixir instead of alternatives. Given how drastically different the BEAM is from these other languages, I have a hard time seeing some of the people I've met (and myself) jump to something else. My guess is that if it does happen to others…

Yes. And in 3 years (or so) when the hype-train moves on, and all that is left is the core users. It will be a much more viable choice for development, in my opinion.

I don't think anything negative of the language or core libraries.

Re: Would you still pick Elixir in 2019?

#66

Post by thedoops »

diminish wrote: post #62

I wouldn't pick Elixir because: Rails has revolutionized web application development on Ruby, with Sinatra as the minimalist version and a lot of "me too" frameworks have been developed, and somehow I like them all. * On Python, Django and Flask * On Elixir, Phoenix * On Crystal, Amber * On Javascript Express js for Sinatra. But on JS we didn't get a successful Rails clone, but a storm of front end frameworks, finall…

If all you're doing is CRUD apps, there's not much more to gain from Elixir. But if you're doing things like pulling in Redis or Sidekiq, or building around realtime use cases - Elixir has so much more to give you.

Re: Would you still pick Elixir in 2019?

#67

Post by arvidkahl »

I've been working with Elixir in a single-developer production system for over a year now. I'm running it in Docker containers on Kubernetes, in the cloud.

It has been extremely stable, scaling has been a non-issue. Error reporting has become easier and easier, now that companies like Sentry and AppSignal have integrations for Elixir.

Elixir is VERY fault-tolerant. DB connection crashing? Ah well, reconnects immediately, while still serving the static parts of the application. PDF generation wonky? Same thing. Incredibly fast on static assets, still very fast for anything else.

I've had nothing but fun with the language and the platform. And the Phoenix Framework is just icing on the cake. I've been fortunate to have been to many community events, and meeting (among so many others) José and Chris at conferences has made me very confident that this piece of software has a bright future. The Elixir slack is also VERY helpful, with maintainers of most important libraries being super responsive.

I would not start another (side or production) project with anything else than Elixir.

Re: Would you still pick Elixir in 2019?

#68

Post by guscost »

phtrivier wrote: post #58

Elixir has great things "of his own": * the syntax is well though-of (`with`, destructuring, `|>` are powerful * message passing has great use-cases And then it has problems that are not necessarily "elixir-y", but are there nonetheless: * it's hard to model an application around the Actor model. It's very easy to abuse it. * it's hard to maintain / refactor a large application without help from the compiler before r…

Thanks for these notes. I’m suspicious of unconditional praise for any technology, and a lot of the goodwill for Elixir seems like it’s biased by the intention to promote adoption of the language, or like it’s from people who haven’t encountered or paid attention to its problematic aspects. Seeing fundamental problems listed like this does more to convince me that it is a real and serious technology (one with a compelling set of strengths, no less).

As for Rust, do try it out. Haskell-esque type checking, the “anti-OO” interpretation of C-style conventions, and memory safety without garbage collection are a seriously potent set of features, but it can be frustrating when you find out yet again that your whole day of R&D leads somewhere incompatible with its philosophy, and is therefore a dead end. I’m building a Rust webservice framework as a hobby/learning project, but it wouldn’t be my first choice for a production API under active development. On the other hand I’m not aware of a better choice for an embedded daemon process or a stable microservice.

Re: Would you still pick Elixir in 2019?

#69

Post by dev_dull »

> No "native" type for JSON data. You always have to parse JSON into a Map and there are excellent libraries for doing this.

I guess the better question would be why is there not an easy, standard lib for doing this in any language in 2019?

Re: Would you still pick Elixir in 2019?

#70

Post by johnchristopher »

mrspeaker wrote: post #15

Could someone give a more concise reason for using Elixir? I have a "rule of 3" for checking out things - the third time I hear it mentioned and it seems interesting, then I'll go check it out. Elixir is past 3 times - so I will check it out for sure! - but this article didn't seem to actually say anything (seemed more like a PR piece that was trying not to be technical, and the main argument appeared to be "well, it…

I am not into Python so I assumed it was the python db thingie.
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