I regret using it. Recruiting risk. Smaller ecosystem. I should have gone for Python.
Will you consider hiring me (remote, non-US) if I pickup the basics in 15 days? I'm open to technical rounds that don't assume elixir familiarity.
Ask HN: Why Isn't Elixir More Popular?
31–40 of 91 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why Isn't Elixir More Popular?
#32Since this thread is going to be bait to more experienced Elixir devs, can someone tell me books, blogs, etc that you like that discuss performance in Elixir? I am working on an Elixir project that in no circumstance should be taxing but it's falling over miserably at like 100 - 200 events per minute. The detail is it is distributed-ish IoT. I didn't write it, the person(s) who did write it are gone, and no one else…
This fits my experience too. I've been able to crush elixir apps pretty easily, cowboy and phoenix. I actually think Elixir really doesn't have great performance. TechEmpower, which is IMO the most real world standardized tests out there shows that Phoenix doesn't even complete. And Elixir+Plug+Ecto performs worse than Rails, which is an entire framework. Everyone in Elixir land tells me "Oh those benchmarks don't ma…
> And they say "Oh we didn't care to put much effort into it", Yet Jose Valim himself tried to work on it and didn't fix it.
This is inaccurate. I have started looking again into solutions only last week [1]. My suspicion was always the database pool size was too small but, when I tried to contribute 4+ years ago, fine tuning was hard because it took too long, so I didn't pursue it further [2].
My discontent with the benchmarks is that they are not measuring what people effectively run in production. Since you mentioned Rails, here is how a Rails application looks like:
https://github.com/TechEmpower/FrameworkBenchmarks/blob/mast...
But almost nobody runs a Rails application like that in production.
And then you look at the configuration of most stacks and they have been explicitly fine tuned to match exactly the concurrency traffic and patterns that the benchmark sends through. But, for most web applications, your web traffic is not homogeneous and you don't have a predetermined number of concurrent requests.
I still believe those benchmarks are not indicative of what you will actually see in production. Most companies who have gone from Rails to Phoenix, for example, report a 10-20x reduction in operation size and costs. But it is clear at this point people put way too much stock on these benchmarks. The irony of it all is that, if someone copies these setups into their actual applications, they will most likely perform worse. Oh well.
[1]: https://github.com/TechEmpower/FrameworkBenchmarks/pull/9302
[2]: https://github.com/TechEmpower/FrameworkBenchmarks/pull/5432 - here you can see me increasing the database pool to 40... but most benchmarks today run with 512-1024 connections (which, once again, is most likely not what you would do in prod). In any case, we need to bump our numbers accordingly.
Re: Ask HN: Why Isn't Elixir More Popular?
#33No manager is going to lose their job by hiring 10 Python and JavaScript engineers to accomplish what could be done with 1 Elixir engineer. And that’s how most time and effort is allocated in our tech labor market economy. It’s by working backwards from “I want to still have a job in tech next year.”
The number of people who are calculating which language to write in by thinking “how can I write a fault-tolerant distributed system with less time and energy so that I can quickly release performant products” is minuscule. The lack of popularity of Elixir is evidence of this I think.
In regards to your point on ZIRP: billions of dollars have been poured in to LLMs that are biased toward legacy languages like Python and JavaScript. Even the file structure of these languages is conducive to LLMs. A HTTP server can be and is frequently defined in a single file or function, where everything from socket creation to connection handling to request parsing to database queries to response can be composed in literally a few lines of code. This immense expressiveness is a testament to the power of HTTP. But as I’m sure we’re all aware there are limits to what can be accomplished with a single machine serving these stateless requests, and the limit can be reached very quickly. But LLMs gravitate towards producing these haiku-like incantations, it’s trivial for them.
Elixir’s power comes from having a well-defined API and explicit failure modes for each of these layers, each in their own expressive modules. This makes it difficult for LLMs to write Phoenix code when they’ve been optimized to output a 3-line FastAPI decorator-definition-query endpoint. Each of these layers in Phoenix is by itself quite simple, each layer has about 2-4 required functions to be implemented, and Phoenix can generate all of these for you. But ChatGPT doesn’t seem to be able to grok it all at once the way a good engineer can after readings the docs for an afternoon.
Will Elixir survive an era of programming where RTFM is a lost art? I suppose we will find out soon enough!
Re: Ask HN: Why Isn't Elixir More Popular?
#34In a commercial setting (i.e. not a side-project) the choice of programming language is also a business decision. The main factors being: - How large is the pool of available candidates for this language? A recruiting risk. - How mature is this language? A business continuity risk.
>How large is the pool of available candidates for this language? A recruiting risk. I worked at a company with a massive Erlang codebase. Really nasty, not really following good OTP practices, etc. HUGE hiring problem and it took 6-12 months to spin up new devs to the point that they could really have ownership over things. And this is not a system that even remotely needed this. Elixir might seem better until you w…
You don't have to learn the Erlang language (and this is commonly echoed by the community). At a certain scale, you have to learn the runtime, but this is the same for any technology. You have to learn JVM if you are doing Kotlin, there are plenty of discussions on V8 internals if you are running Node, etc.
Re: Ask HN: Why Isn't Elixir More Popular?
#35Here’s my anecdote. I built 3 production projects in elixir around 2015-2018, and it was a blast to learn and work with. Those were interesting projects that were a great fit for the stack. One was March Madness bracket game which required a huge throughput on day one, and another was a football game audience play calling each play from their phone as the team is playing live at the stadium. This one needed a lot of…
I have to say this is a really good summary from my perspective too. Different exposure and projects, but the experience in terms of ergonomics and other developer experience was much the same. I never felt truly proficient. I recall years ago interviewing for a role and straight up telling the interviewer I wasn’t very good with Elixir. That’s just how it made me feel. In retrospect I was fine, I built some interest…
I have this same feeling using Elixir, and I think it’s because it’s excellent at showing you exactly where you have undefined behavior in your application, much in the same way you spend most of your time writing Rust by wrangling with the compiler that keeps showing you all the holes in your logic. You can write a seemingly equivalent program in Python, and it runs just fine because it’s interpreted, so it seems like you hit the bullseye first try. But as we’re all aware, there are still countless bugs in your system, they just don’t surface until later when it’s Friday night and your website finally went viral. It’s the downside of the “fail fast, fail often” OTP paradigm: you develop the program by working through your faulty logic step by step as determined by the (many) errors raised by the BEAM. The upside being that unlike Python none of these errors are usually strong enough to be fatal to your application.
Re: Ask HN: Why Isn't Elixir More Popular?
#36I'm Not a Professional dev, but a sysadmin WHO Likes to code. I learned a bunch of languages over the year. C#, Java, Python, JS/TS, PowerShell, Rust. Not professionally, but enough to finish some Personal projects.
Elixir was so vastly different, had such a small community that I lost interest very, very fast. It just felt like a waste of time. Any of the other languages I learned I could and did apply at my job. Even just knowing the languages helps a great deal when evaluating the next tech stack to implement. And Elixir just doesn't. It's a niche language for niche applications and doesn't personally help me in the least.
I also just did not like the DX. I did fail to understand how to use the VS Code debugger to step through functions. Printing to console to inspect variables felt like being in the stone age again, no thank you.
I still believe Phoenix LiveView is a really, really good tech and currently wish that Svelte could implement something like that.
And that's my personal reason for not looking into it.
Re: Ask HN: Why Isn't Elixir More Popular?
#37A limited job market, considerably smaller ecosystem (compared to java/python), and lack of support from major tech corporations (unlike Go or Rust) makes it challenging to adopt Elixir.
At my company , we inherited a legacy Elixir service, but we're actively moving away from it. We found it more practical to rewrite the service in Go (entire team is proficient in + LLMs make it easier to migrate) rather than invest time and resources into learning Elixir and its associated ecosystem. The return on investment for mastering Elixir didn't justify the effort required, given our specific circumstances and needs.
I do like to tinker with Elixir for hobby projects. But supporting a whole new language in a company is an uphill battle, that's incredibly hard to justify.
Re: Ask HN: Why Isn't Elixir More Popular?
#38Here’s my anecdote. I built 3 production projects in elixir around 2015-2018, and it was a blast to learn and work with. Those were interesting projects that were a great fit for the stack. One was March Madness bracket game which required a huge throughput on day one, and another was a football game audience play calling each play from their phone as the team is playing live at the stadium. This one needed a lot of…
> I’m still looking back at Elixir with nostalgia, wondering if I’m going to have a chance to go back to it and really make it an extension of my arms/brain like Ruby had become.
You should give it another try. :)
You jumped in quite early, when we were still collectively figuring out what it meant to build Phoenix applications, and many things were in flush back then. You probably went through Ecto 1 -> 2 -> 3 and Phoenix was migrating to contexts.
But I also have to say there was a lot of FOMO in relation to OTP back then: people felt they had to build these amazing supervision designs, otherwise they were not using the language correctly. But the truth is that they are building blocks for frameworks and certain libraries, in the same way threads/mutexes are for other languages. Of course, GenServers are higher-level, more expressive, and bring more properties, but the overall idea is that they are about infrastructure, and not design. Phoenix, Ecto, Broadway, etc should be spawning 99% of the processes that you need for you.
Re: Ask HN: Why Isn't Elixir More Popular?
#39I can't say about mass popularity but for me personally the lack of static types has held me back from using it. Now that it's being gradually introduced I am looking forward to trying it
Re: Ask HN: Why Isn't Elixir More Popular?
#40I'm Not a Professional dev, but a sysadmin WHO Likes to code. I learned a bunch of languages over the year. C#, Java, Python, JS/TS, PowerShell, Rust. Not professionally, but enough to finish some Personal projects. Elixir was so vastly different, had such a small community that I lost interest very, very fast. It just felt like a waste of time. Any of the other languages I learned I could and did apply at my job. Ev…
> I still believe Phoenix LiveView is a really, really good tech and currently wish that Svelte could implement something like that.
Not what you meant, but there's this:
https://github.com/woutdp/live_svelte
> I did fail to understand how to use the VS Code debugger to step through functions.
Did you have any luck with the ElixirLS extension?