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Ask HN: Why Isn't Elixir More Popular?

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Re: Ask HN: Why Isn't Elixir More Popular?

#71

Post by DoesntMatter22 »

gregors wrote: post #59
josevalim wrote: post #32

Earlier 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…

The techempower repo is literally a gift to the world. I've seen and learned many ways of optimizing code ...almost none of which should ever be used in production or would ever make it past a PR at most companies. Still, it's amazing in the amount of non-realistic approaches used. It really is a work of art.

I hate when people downplay TechEmpower. They are the best benchmarks going, and awesome because anyone can contribute and as you said there is a lot of learning that can be done there.

Re: Ask HN: Why Isn't Elixir More Popular?

#72

Post by abhisgup »

wkyleg wrote: post #5
johnklos wrote: post #2

Got me. Running Akkoma on Elixir is a piece of cake, relatively speaking. Trying to run Mastodon on Ruby by simply using the latest version of the required Ruby components hasn't worked for me, ever. The idea that we'd need to keep a snapshot of modules from a specific date in order to run certain software is ridiculous, and the idea of running it in a container like Docker is just giving in to bad practices. Too oft…

Yes! That's a good point Docker is another technology that is sort of ridiculous from this perspective. Deploying an entire OS just to make dealing with dependencies easier

You are not exactly deploying an entire OS as the overhead of that would be huge. You are deploying an isolated process group having the bells and whistles of the OS you like.

Re: Ask HN: Why Isn't Elixir More Popular?

#73

Post by abhisgup »

ipnon wrote: post #33

No 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 dist…

So everything is a conspiracy?

Re: Ask HN: Why Isn't Elixir More Popular?

#74

Post by moooo99 »

abhisgup wrote: post #73
ipnon wrote: post #33

No 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 dist…

So everything is a conspiracy?

Whenever it suits our own personal beliefs. If not, then no.

Re: Ask HN: Why Isn't Elixir More Popular?

#75

Post by kugelblitz »

I use Symfony (PHP based framework) and it works fine. I've been able to get into Django (Python), Laravel (PHP), Java (Spring) and even Grails (Groovy) because they either had similar concepts or even similar syntax (I mostly do web development, so this is a very biased take).

Being a freelancer, I need to focus on what's marketable. Sure, Elixir will get me into a niche, but I will have way less projects to choose from. And when I start a project for a company, if I start with Elixir, I will also have a smaller pool of devs to recruit from. It's a chicken-and-egg problem.

Nowadays, if I start a project, I would try to build on monolith and full framework with a PaaS.

Unfortunately, most projects want to start out "the right way", which means separate backend (e.g. Java), separate frontend (React), rented server (e.g. Hetzner server) and custom deployment (some pipeline an outside agency built when they first started the project).

I'd rather spend 400 USD on tools each month, but then only need 1-2 full stack devs instead of 6-8 people (1 sys admin, 1-2 deployment, 2 backend, 2 frontend) and with all the overhead that comes with it.

Re: Ask HN: Why Isn't Elixir More Popular?

#76

Post by kdemetter »

I love Elixir, and I've been learning it because I see the potential. But, it is a steep learning curve, and it's quite a different paradigm than most developers are used to.

Which means it would be very difficult to get it adopted in say a company, because it would require lots of money to retrain people and it's harder to find people for it.

I think it might also have a marketing problem, in that it uses the Erlang VM which is pretty old. That's actually evidence of it's strength, but it's less sexy than doing something completely new

Re: Ask HN: Why Isn't Elixir More Popular?

#77

Post by kdemetter »

I love Elixir, and I've been learning it because I see the potential. But, it is a steep learning curve, and it's quite a different paradigm than most developers are used to.

Which means it would be very difficult to get it adopted in say a company, because it would require lots of money to retrain people and it's harder to find people for it.

I think it might also have a marketing problem, in that it uses the Erlang VM which is pretty old. That's actually evidence of it's strength, but it's less sexy than doing something completely new.

However, I think it's a great language to just try out yourself. Even if you won't be able to use it professionally, you'll still learning something you can use in your job as well.

Re: Ask HN: Why Isn't Elixir More Popular?

#78

Post by mattbrewsbytes »

hakunin wrote: post #16

Here’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…

There are really neat parts of Elixir. For full stack web dev pretend you are building a lego town. Elixir/Phoenix is more of a set of lego bricks vs. Ruby/Rails is completed foundations of sets you are putting finishing touches on and plugging together. At least that is my experience using it.

There also is the human aspect of Elixir or arguably any language/framework comparison and inertia to change. One could argue all the technical merits of one vs. another but at the end of the day, successful business outcomes are not going to change much _because_ of the technology choice.

It's hard to get a company that has a lot of Ruby/Rails apps and knowledge to commit to training existing developers on something else with the net result being, its just a different language/framework. When you're building data intensive web applications, Rails will scale. The vast majority of cost with data intensive apps is disk storage which it doesn't really matter what web tech stack you're running.

Re: Ask HN: Why Isn't Elixir More Popular?

#79

Post by aristofun »

One of the reasons is that FP languages just don’t feel natural to most beginners. It gives the language a very niche vibes. And rightfully so, I suppose.

But the key reason is that no giant has sponsored and promoted it.

Products are virtually never popular because of their internal qualities.

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