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10 years-ish of Elixir

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Re: 10 years-ish of Elixir

#61

Post by amattn »

cactus2093 wrote: post #41
nudpiedo wrote: post #21

it looks really awesome! Can someone point out the negative sides (or drawbacks of any kind) ? What about finding elixir experts/freelancers? What about integration with .Net and the xamarin forms ecosystem?

Drawbacks I see are: 1. no static typing. With typescript having taken off, and now even python and ruby becoming more and more feasible to use in production with static typing, switching to a new dynamic language is a hard sell for me. 2. limited ability to take full advantage of some of its unique features in many cases. The runtime and the included OTP library/paradigm has some really cool features with its approa…

static typing is what drew me to go, Elixir isn't a static-typed language, but there are plenty of guardrails in the language that make up for it. Pattern-matching, guards, good compiler messages, casting, etc.

You've also got fantastic testing framework, and good conventions like tagged tuples {:ok, x} vs {:error, y}.

On top of all of that, you've got the Erlang underpinnings: immutability, crash-fast, app umbrellas, etc.

It's a very safe language to develop in. I don't miss the strict static typing at all.

Re: 10 years-ish of Elixir

#62

Post by jrochkind1 »

sodapopcan wrote: post #52
Areading314 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What turned me off about elixir was not the syntax, it was the flexibility in designing new syntax. It felt like each library had its own idioms and syntax rules, which just adds a huge amount of variety and difficulty in a codebase. It was hard to have consistent architectural patterns across a team. I've seen an elixir/phoenix backend rewritten completely in python/django and it was a big improvement in developer p…

As in the whole project was rewritten in Django or some kind of transpiration going on there? I haven't gotten to the point where I'm adding a lot of libs yet and certainly can't speak to using it in a big team. In terms of syntax flexibility, Ruby has a similar issue where a lot of popular libs implement their own DSLs. I've never fully bought that that is a problem—a library is going to have an API that will requir…

> In terms of syntax flexibility, Ruby has a similar issue where a lot of popular libs implement their own DSLs.

Of course in ruby, nobody is actually adding new syntax, although that's a common misconception. Ruby DSL's are still just ordinary syntax for method calls and block parameters, there's no new syntax at all. Sometimes it can look like it, maybe because ruby method calls don't require parentheses? But no library truly adds syntax to ruby, they just define methods that can be called.

I am not familiar with elixir, I am curious if what we're talking about is an ability in elixir to truly add new syntax, or something more like Ruby so-called "DSLs".

Re: 10 years-ish of Elixir

#63

Post by s3cur3 »

likortera wrote: post #43

Meanwhile te company I work for is moving away from it. We cannot find enough people with enough knowledge to be already productive in it. Not many want to learn it because it is considered pretty niche, and the ones willing to learn will need many months or years to be productive and build with some level of quality, and once they learn they move away to bigger companies which pay more. We end up paying to people to…

I don't say this to dismiss your experience, but just to share a counterexample:

I found Elixir extremely easy to learn (despite having no Ruby experience, nor any significant experience in any functional languages). I went through the (excellent) official tutorial in a couple days, skimmed parts of Saša Juric's book, and felt reasonably confident diving in to actually writing code. Within a couple weeks I felt like I "got" OTP and idiomatic Elixir.

I do agree that, at least for somebody who uses Intellij IDEs exclusively, the lack of good first-party support sucks. I do most of my debugging via unit tests and "printf" because the Intellij Elixir plugin's interpreted mode is just too slow for the debugger to be useful to me.

Re: 10 years-ish of Elixir

#64

Post by amattn »

likortera wrote: post #43

Meanwhile te company I work for is moving away from it. We cannot find enough people with enough knowledge to be already productive in it. Not many want to learn it because it is considered pretty niche, and the ones willing to learn will need many months or years to be productive and build with some level of quality, and once they learn they move away to bigger companies which pay more. We end up paying to people to…

Anecdotally, having managed elixir teams and talked to other managers of elixir teams:

- The learning curve is real. but 2-6 months for us, not years. It's not particularly hard, just longer than a small language like go.

- Having Ruby and/or functional programming experience shortens that learning curve.

- Developer experience/satisfaction is very high. This helps retention

- Some devs will just never "get/grok" Elixir. They may have 20 years of java experience or a new dev better suited to a FE role. This doesn't mean they are bad, just not a great fit.

- The devs that do get it? They are quite productive. Feature velocity is high.

I disagree that Elixir/Phoenix isn't a fit for CRUD apps. I'm seeing high feature velocity across small and large scale products.

In particular, feature velocity per engineer is quite high. A smaller team in Elixir/Phoenix/LiveView can outpace a similar full stack team.

Re: 10 years-ish of Elixir

#65

Post by d3ckard »

josevalim wrote: post #2

Author here! The article was published earlier this week and I have a quick addendum: regarding Erlang/Elixir, my goal has always been to bring new developers to the platform. After all, Erlang developers already have the most important part of Elixir, which is the Erlang runtime! There are also key people in both communities working hard to make sure the tooling is consistent across all languages. A lot of this effo…

Thanks from me as well. It’s been more than 5 years since switching from Ruby and I have never regretted it. You did and continue to do great work(and whole team as well). Can’t wait for the big thing at Lambda Days!

Re: 10 years-ish of Elixir

#66

Post by didibus »

likortera wrote: post #43

Meanwhile te company I work for is moving away from it. We cannot find enough people with enough knowledge to be already productive in it. Not many want to learn it because it is considered pretty niche, and the ones willing to learn will need many months or years to be productive and build with some level of quality, and once they learn they move away to bigger companies which pay more. We end up paying to people to…

Hey, thanks for providing your personal feedback.

Could you provide a little bit more context around where it's coming from so I know how to interpret it?

Are you someone who recently joined this company and is now having to learn Elixir? If so, are you finding it difficult? Has it been taking you months or years to learn it and still feel like you don't know it well enough? How long have you spent trying to learn?

Or are you someone who knows Elixir very well and has worked at the company for a long time doing Elixir work and you're observing the struggle to find new junior hires that are willing to learn it and finding it hard to teach it to them? It be nice if you could tell us the number of years of experience you have with Beam and Elixir as well.

Thanks

Re: 10 years-ish of Elixir

#67

Post by rattray »

Areading314 wrote: post #36
sodapopcan wrote: post #29

I'm building my first non-toy app in LiveView. I'm blown away by how quickly I can move with it and love how Phoenix encourages DDD practices. I'm a bit saddened that Elixir isn't bigger than it is. It's such a great entry into the world of BEAM and functional programming yet I've read more than once that people aren't interested because "it looks like Ruby and I don't like Ruby". There are some more legit reasons as…

What turned me off about elixir was not the syntax, it was the flexibility in designing new syntax. It felt like each library had its own idioms and syntax rules, which just adds a huge amount of variety and difficulty in a codebase. It was hard to have consistent architectural patterns across a team. I've seen an elixir/phoenix backend rewritten completely in python/django and it was a big improvement in developer p…

Does elixir have good equivalents of JS's prettier and eslint tools?

Re: 10 years-ish of Elixir

#68

Post by AlchemistCamp »

rekoros wrote: post #50
josevalim wrote: post #2

Author here! The article was published earlier this week and I have a quick addendum: regarding Erlang/Elixir, my goal has always been to bring new developers to the platform. After all, Erlang developers already have the most important part of Elixir, which is the Erlang runtime! There are also key people in both communities working hard to make sure the tooling is consistent across all languages. A lot of this effo…

I started with Elixir last year, after ten years of Erlang - definitely an upgrade! My favorite improvement is the existence of Ecto - what an amazing piece of software. Thanks for all your work and vision!

I've also realized in this past year that the first thing I miss when going back to Node or another stack is Ecto.

That doesn't diminish anything about the Elixir language, either. In many languages, Ecto's DSL wouldn't be performant, practical or even possible.

Re: 10 years-ish of Elixir

#69

Post by jswny »

Areading314 wrote: post #36
sodapopcan wrote: post #29

I'm building my first non-toy app in LiveView. I'm blown away by how quickly I can move with it and love how Phoenix encourages DDD practices. I'm a bit saddened that Elixir isn't bigger than it is. It's such a great entry into the world of BEAM and functional programming yet I've read more than once that people aren't interested because "it looks like Ruby and I don't like Ruby". There are some more legit reasons as…

What turned me off about elixir was not the syntax, it was the flexibility in designing new syntax. It felt like each library had its own idioms and syntax rules, which just adds a huge amount of variety and difficulty in a codebase. It was hard to have consistent architectural patterns across a team. I've seen an elixir/phoenix backend rewritten completely in python/django and it was a big improvement in developer p…

Can you give an example of what you mean by “idioms and syntax rules”?

I’ve been using Elixir for a long time and I don’t know what this could refer to. Even with macros, all code still has to follow the same Elixir syntax. You can’t actually change that syntax nor can you extend it for the most part unless you are using libraries that are somehow writing their own control structures they are forcing you to use or something? I’ve never heard of that.

Also, if you are just talking about enforcing consistency style wise, there's https://github.com/rrrene/credo which is very popular, and the build tool Mix comes with a formatter by default which can standardize your codebase.

Re: 10 years-ish of Elixir

#70

Post by jswny »

rattray wrote: post #67
Areading314 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What turned me off about elixir was not the syntax, it was the flexibility in designing new syntax. It felt like each library had its own idioms and syntax rules, which just adds a huge amount of variety and difficulty in a codebase. It was hard to have consistent architectural patterns across a team. I've seen an elixir/phoenix backend rewritten completely in python/django and it was a big improvement in developer p…

Does elixir have good equivalents of JS's prettier and eslint tools?

Yes there is a formatter built into Mix, the Elixir build tool. There is also https://github.com/rrrene/credo which is not as extensive but does the same thing as ESLint.
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