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Ask HN: Who regrets choosing Elixir?

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Re: Ask HN: Who regrets choosing Elixir?

#201

Post by PragmaticPulp »

alex55 wrote: post #80

I work for a Ruby on Rails shop and we used Elixir for two projects about a year or two ago when it was getting a lot of good press. The first project was an API that was intended to serve as a middleman between a few legacy services. Basically the company that hired us was building a new JSON API but didn't want to rewrite all their old code and our job was to consume the output from their ugly legacy APIs and produ…

> Elixir/Phoenix worked for the first service, but after that we ran into problem after problem.

> Most other devs I talk to in person at other agencies that tried Elixir have (surprisingly) neutral or slightly negative feelings about Elixir/Phoenix. Some percentage of people on Hacker News absolutely love Elixir (and often hate Ruby/Rails) and they usually flood the comment section of any Elixir article.

This mirrors our experience, albeit with Erlang.

Every time I try to talk about negative experiences with Erlang online, people come out of the woodwork to pick apart my stories and assume we were just incompetent. Erlang/Elixir have an almost mythical reputation in online communities. A lot of people have completed some basic Erlang or Elixir tutorials and assume they're just a few steps away from running a massive WhatsApp-style backend, but it's not that simple.

If a company wants to go all-in on Erlang/Elixir and maintain a staff of multiple Erlang/Elixir devs for the lifetime of the service, that's one thing. However, decisions to write core features in these less popular languages should not be taken lightly.

Re: Ask HN: Who regrets choosing Elixir?

#202

Post by craigsmansion »

carapace wrote: post #188
craigsmansion wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there was no one left who could support an Erlang system. If you have $200k "python engineers" on the payroll who wouldn't jump at the opportunity to do some additional Erlang, maybe it's time to reconsider your hiring practices and that is the real cautionary tale.

This, twice. Back in the day people would balk at hiring Python programmers saying, "there are so many more Java programmers", and I used to say, "Why would you hire a Java programmer who was unwilling or unable to learn Python?" Same logic applies here: Why would you hire a Python programmer who was unwilling or unable to learn Erlang? (Especially if you're going to pay them to do it!) If you can't switch languages…

Regrettably, also back in the day and probably around the same time, companies who wanted to hire "outside of the box" asked for Python. Not because they were python shops, but because they figured that people who had an interest in a new but not-quite-commercially viable language must have some sort of intrinsic interest in programming, and would likely make for better programmers.

Re: Ask HN: Who regrets choosing Elixir?

#203

Post by 1_player »

hartator wrote: post #102

I’ve played with Elixir/Phoenix a little bit and was not very happy with a few things: - Debugging is hard. You can’t throw a REPL wherever your want in your code and pipe states are hard to inspect. - Serving static files in Phoenix is oddly super hacky. - Deploy is hard. Mostly by the lack of support out there in term of documentation and services.

How is serving static files super hacky? We're serving assets and custom uploads from Phoenix and it took me about 10 seconds to set it up (just change the Plug.Static configuration)

Re: Ask HN: Who regrets choosing Elixir?

#204

Post by treis »

rahimnathwani wrote: post #113
treis wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean more stuff like Devise for authentication, Apartment for multitenancy, ancestry for hierarchical data, etc. Seems like every common problem has a gem that solves it. Does Elixir/Phoenix have equivalents?

Triplex / Apartment Coherence / Devise ExAdmin / ActiveAdmin

Are they as good as the Rails equivalent?

Re: Ask HN: Who regrets choosing Elixir?

#205

Post by tyurok »

freedomben wrote: post #53

I've done both, much more Rails than Phoenix, but I'm not doing any new development in Rails. I do regret choosing Elixir at times for the following reasons: 1. I am new to the language (I've been using it for "years" but only very part time (not part of my day job)). While the functional approach does lead to much more elegant code, it can also be super esoteric to me as I'm new to and somewhat uncomfortable with th…

The annoyance over non-functional code is real.

I can't tolerate OOP stuff that `obj1.calls(obj2)` and changes `obj2` anymore. I didn't care before, now it makes me want to refactor everything or not write it at all.

Using Elixir kind of made me not want to use anything else.

Re: Ask HN: Who regrets choosing Elixir?

#206

Post by [deleted] »

craigsmansion wrote: post #164
as-j wrote: post #92

TL;DNR, use a language your company can support. It doesn't matter how suited to the job a language is, if it's single Engineer or small team, what happens when they move on? How do you support it? Who's on call? Not Elixir, but a cautionary tale from our Erlang project. ~8 years ago a our IoT backend was written in Erlang, this was the early days of IoT, so sure it made sense as a technology, could scale well, handl…

> there was no one left who could support an Erlang system. If you have $200k "python engineers" on the payroll who wouldn't jump at the opportunity to do some additional Erlang, maybe it's time to reconsider your hiring practices and that is the real cautionary tale.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Who regrets choosing Elixir?

#208

Post by setr »

kenhwang wrote: post #152
brazzy wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So how about don't be stupid about it and instead make three engineers devote 1/3 of their time to this? That way it's a broadening rather than a redirection of their career, they can help each other, the on call duties are shared, and the business isn't dependant on a single person.

To me, this is the sniff test of a good engineer. All the good engineers I've known would've jumped at the opportunity to learn a new technology on company time/money. The engineers that refuse to learn generally don't grow.

The term used within my circles is 10x1 engineers -- they've replicated their first year of experience/learning 10 times over. Biggest thing to watch out for when hiring "senior" devs

Re: Ask HN: Who regrets choosing Elixir?

#209

Post by s3cur3 »

I’m primarily a C++ dev, so that colors a lot of what I think about the 3rd party library situation in Elixir. Because of the abysmal state of package management in C++, it’s usually easier to implement stuff yourself (tailored exactly to your own needs, and therefore with an extremely limited scope) than it is to bring in a heavyweight third-party library.

For that reason, I was pretty comfortable coming to Elixir and implementing Somewhat esoteric, games-specific networking stuff myself. It would have been nice if the library had already existed, but I am so glad I went with Elixir rather than Node or PHP (which both do have the game networking library I needed).

My experience has basically been that the “fat head” of open source libraries exists in Elixir, but the long tail of more esoteric stuff does not. By its nature, though, you won’t need 99% of the esoteric stuff available in other languages.

Re: Ask HN: Who regrets choosing Elixir?

#210

Post by kbyatnal »

carapace wrote: post #188
craigsmansion wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there was no one left who could support an Erlang system. If you have $200k "python engineers" on the payroll who wouldn't jump at the opportunity to do some additional Erlang, maybe it's time to reconsider your hiring practices and that is the real cautionary tale.

This, twice. Back in the day people would balk at hiring Python programmers saying, "there are so many more Java programmers", and I used to say, "Why would you hire a Java programmer who was unwilling or unable to learn Python?" Same logic applies here: Why would you hire a Python programmer who was unwilling or unable to learn Erlang? (Especially if you're going to pay them to do it!) If you can't switch languages…

Can you expand what you mean re: large projects in Python?
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