My experience with Elixir has been great but one area of improvement is debugging. Maybe it's because I'm so used to using something like Chrome's developer tools, but I wish there was something as easy to use for setting breakpoints and inspecting the environment. Would love to know how others are debugging currently!
Why am I interested in Elixir?
61–70 of 183 posts
Re: Why am I interested in Elixir?
#62Re: Why am I interested in Elixir?
#63My experience with Elixir has been great but one area of improvement is debugging. Maybe it's because I'm so used to using something like Chrome's developer tools, but I wish there was something as easy to use for setting breakpoints and inspecting the environment. Would love to know how others are debugging currently!
During a recent developer meetup in my country, I went to an elixir workshop where the host (an independent consultant) confided in us that several of her main clients had asked her to not reveal that they use elixir - they're apparently so happy with their choice that they treat it as a competitive advantage and claim to use a different stack when asked by competitors.
I can't know for sure if she was bluffing, but the idea really was interesting enough to make me wonder.
Edit: sorry, this was supposed to be a top level comment.
Re: Why am I interested in Elixir?
#64We are building a sales automation app using Elixir and Vue.
Our dev team seem really happy with this tech stack.
Productivity is awesome - we are four months in and already have similar functionality to a (sort of) competitor that has spent several years on their dev. This is the first dev project I have experienced where we are ahead of our planned milestones. Got to find some more features to quickly add!
My original concern was getting hold of developers as Elixir lacks the pure numbers of people that other server environments enjoy, but this has not been an issue. If anything we have got more senior devs then we would otherwise be able to get as they are excited to be able to use Elixir. Oskar in Poland and Dan in London, hats off, you are awesome!
Not sure if I agree with others that the broader environment is underdeveloped - yes there may be less versions of the same thing compared to a large JavaScript framework, but what is there is absolute quality.
Only (small) gripe is that Elixir is not a fast language. At one stage I thought this was going to be a real issue, but great support from the community and improved understanding on how to do things the Elixir way (let it fail!) seems to have resolved this for us.
Re: Why am I interested in Elixir?
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
Deployments are a mess and as it is interpreted, performance is closer to Ruby than Go. I found the community to be pretty disappointing (but YMMV obviously) — it seemed more alternative oriented than the Rust community (which seems more solutions oriented).
It's not a mess. Mostly It was just unclear mixed of runtime and compile time configuration that contribute the inconvenience. Elixir 1.9 just comes up with a simple built-in release mechanism with more clear on how you put configuration.
Sounds compilicated.
Re: Why am I interested in Elixir?
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are there no bad parts?
I've used it sparingly, I think deploying is pretty bad with it. I like the convenience of deploying a golang app, just one executable.
OTP releases let you build something akin to this, where the runtime and all the dependencies are bundled in; so long as you built it for the right architecture (much like a binary), it's a single command to run your app.
This used to be done with Distillery[1], but I suspect its use will go down now that Elixir has native OTP releases.[2].
In either case, there's still work behind it, but it's not like deploying Ruby, Python, or Node, where you have to be pretty careful about library paths and runtime versions.
[1]: https://github.com/bitwalker/distillery
[2]: https://elixir-lang.org/blog/2019/06/24/elixir-v1-9-0-released/Re: Why am I interested in Elixir?
#67I just finished writing my own in-house static site builder in Elixir. I come from the Ruby land. If you thought Ruby was awesome, then you would LOVE Elixir. I was hesitant at first, thinking "not another language.." but once I gave it a shot, I stopped looking back.
I'm an individual consultant with a very small team. Without Elixir, many projects that I've finished in weeks would have taken me months. This is a seriously under-rated language that would make you wonder why didn't you give it a shot earlier. It's that good.
My static site is now way faster than Jekyll or Middleman. I didn't re-write it for speed, speed was just a nice side-effect. I wrote it mostly for the language's flexibility.
With Ruby, which Middleman and Jekyll both use, you need to think in the traditional OOP way and sooner or later, you will hit the limits of the language itself. Whereas, with Elixir, everything is taken care of by guards. This is really one of the nicest codebases I've ever written in a while. This is in comparison to my earlier codebase which was written in Ruby, and I had to do all sorts of things like install a library to make the language more scalable. That was the ugliest hack I've ever done. [1]
Imagine, a Wordpress clone, only it runs on your computer and generates static files (this was my goal) but, written in less than a month by one person, working a full time job, with the same fit and finish of Wordpress.
Elixir is amazing.
Re: Why am I interested in Elixir?
#68I just finished writing my own in-house static site builder in Elixir. I come from the Ruby land. If you thought Ruby was awesome, then you would LOVE Elixir. I was hesitant at first, thinking "not another language.." but once I gave it a shot, I stopped looking back. I'm an individual consultant with a very small team. Without Elixir, many projects that I've finished in weeks would have taken me months. This is a se…
That's cool. Why didn't you use Wordpress?
Re: Why am I interested in Elixir?
#69I just finished writing my own in-house static site builder in Elixir. I come from the Ruby land. If you thought Ruby was awesome, then you would LOVE Elixir. I was hesitant at first, thinking "not another language.." but once I gave it a shot, I stopped looking back. I'm an individual consultant with a very small team. Without Elixir, many projects that I've finished in weeks would have taken me months. This is a se…
> My static site is now way faster than Jekyll or Middleman.
What? You mean the generation step is faster?
Re: Why am I interested in Elixir?
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not a mess. Mostly It was just unclear mixed of runtime and compile time configuration that contribute the inconvenience. Elixir 1.9 just comes up with a simple built-in release mechanism with more clear on how you put configuration.
Sounds compilicated.
Aren't most things that actual survive encounters with the real world?
Make it as simple as possible, but no simpler.