Ultimately, Elixir is a functional programming language.
Has any functional language ever really become popular?
Ask HN: Why Isn't Elixir More Popular?
41–50 of 91 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why Isn't Elixir More Popular?
#42Straight up - you should not use it without much more compelling reasons than those you have outlined.
It's not OK as CTO to push your company to use for favorite pet slightly obscure technology.
The company needs ordinary technologies to get its job done - Java, C#, TypeScript, Golang, Python, something like that. Maybe even Ruby but frankly that causes hiring headaches too.
Unless the company is doing something so extraordinary that it NEEDS Elixir over the technologies above, and it probably doesn't need it.
I know companies that went all in on Elixir - they spend all their time trying to recruit Elixir developers from a tiny recruiting pool, or trying to find people willing to learn it and bring them up to speed. This is poor business practice - there was nothing they were doing that could not be done just as effectively with any of the other major languages.
Just use normal technologies, have all the people and documentation and training and other resources available and get on with the job of building the software that the business needs.
I guarantee you that the company that went with Elixir due to the enthusiasm of some current or past CTO will have to go through the painful process of getting rid of it.
Elixir is for personal projects. Corporate software development is mature enough now that ordinary technologies are extraordinarily powerful and there's almost no reason sufficiently compelling to not use them. Toys are for home, tools are for work.
Re: Ask HN: Why Isn't Elixir More Popular?
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Hiring for elixir was great, it self selected people who wrote code as their craft I worked at a company that hired like this. On the whole it was good, but it wasn’t a panacea. A surprising number ended up being academic types that were extremely smart but could never actually finish anything. Amazing guys to talk to at lunch though!
The stereotype of Haskell programmers seems to extend to the entirety of FP, then.
When you want to write a monad the first step is usually to take a coffee break to make sure everyone agrees on what a monad is.
Re: Ask HN: Why Isn't Elixir More Popular?
#44Used elixir a few years ago for tutorials and such, worked fine.
Tried to use it again in 2023, vscode extension would break. Tried on 2 windows machine and one linux machine, exetension always broke.
I then figured out why (I don't remember the exact reason, it was one of those "yeah I can see why it didn't work and it's my fault but it kinda isn't really" situations) but at that point I was done because I had better stuff to do.
Point being, if you want your stuff to be adopted make sure the tooling is noob friendly. The noobs of today can be the professionals of tomorrow.
Especially today when there is so much stuff to learn and elixir is so far from the usual and requires a certain time investment
Re: Ask HN: Why Isn't Elixir More Popular?
#45Most people just want to get something done and reach for the tools that will most straightforwardly and simply get them to their destination. Niche stuff doesn’t have the market fit because you’ll always have a hard time finding people to work on your product that don’t cost twice as much as everyone else, unless it’s 10x faster gtm / 10x cheaper. Seems obvious enough.
Personally? I like good typesystems and very sharp tooling. It has seemed to me that Elixir has neither, and doesn’t really offer me a particularly big advantage that would outweigh those disadvantages.
Re: Ask HN: Why Isn't Elixir More Popular?
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Sounds like you are agreeing with me. You tried to work on it years ago and didn't fix it. Even when it was completing last year it's performance was half of what Rails was, which isn't known to be fast [1].
The database pool needs to be at 512 to 1024? Yet Rails seems to get away with far less than that and still have better performance.[2]
Even if, somehow, Elixir is actually faster, which seemingly lacks evidence at this point other than some anecdotes by people who have a vested interest in people adopting the language (primarily Elixir dev shops and framework/language authors), the fact that the community of Elixir devs cannot get decent results on these tests says a lot.
If these people can't get good results in tuning Elixir, who can?
Not a surprise to see people ITT also noting that they ran into the same types of problems that the tests reveal.
[1]: https://github.com/TechEmpower/FrameworkBenchmarks/blob/mast...
[2]: https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r21&hw=...
Re: Ask HN: Why Isn't Elixir More Popular?
#47Here’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 P…
> 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.
Exactly!
Contexts really threw me off, because I couldn't figure out how/why would I set a boundary up front, if I'm not even sure how the app is going to turn out.
Re: Ask HN: Why Isn't Elixir More Popular?
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
Sounds like you are agreeing with me. You tried to work on it years ago and didn't fix it. Even when it was completing last year it's performance was half of what Rails was, which isn't known to be fast [1]. The database pool needs to be at 512 to 1024? Yet Rails seems to get away with far less than that and still have better performance.[2] Even if, somehow, Elixir is actually faster, which seemingly lacks evidence…
> The database pool needs to be at 512 to 1024? Yet Rails seems to get away with far less than that and still have better performance.[2]
Rails concurrency model is per process. So you will have `n_workers` pools and the amount of connections will be `n_workers * 3` based on the code you shared. The production machine has 28 total threads [1], which means Rails is starting 35 workers, according to their auto tuning code [2]. Overall, Rails uses 35x more pools than the Phoenix application and has twice the number of connections (105). It is absurd to imply that Rails is actually running with far less.
Second of all, the database pool needs to be 512 or 1024 if your app server can push traffic quickly enough to the database. If you are increasing the Rails pool size and it is not getting faster, then Rails is your bottleneck. Based on the runs I did last week, it seems the pool is the bottleneck in Elixir's case. We will know for sure in a couple weeks once the PRs land.
> If these people can't get good results in tuning Elixir, who can?
You can look at the results from the latest community efforts in main: https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=test&runid=1...
If you want to compare with Rails in particular, we beat Rails in every benchmark except two:
1. Single query: which will be tackled by better sizing our pools
2. Plain text: where we are currently sending the wrong payload (but when we sent the proper payload, as in the last published round, we beat Rails too)
And it does not include any of my proposed changes yet.
My point is exactly that the feedback cycle is long, so it takes time, and I was not able to invest time before. But given how intent some folks are to misinterpret benchmarks (and assign malice to the whole community), it is probably better to continue looking into it.
[1]: https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/120474/...
[2]: https://github.com/TechEmpower/FrameworkBenchmarks/blob/mast...
Re: Ask HN: Why Isn't Elixir More Popular?
#49From my point of view, it builds on BEAM, and while Erlang might have been a success story in telecommunications, there is no reason for any of my employers to use it instead of JVM or CLR, and the languages available to them.
Re: Ask HN: Why Isn't Elixir More Popular?
#50We're using it with great success at kosmi.io