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Elixir at Ramp
11–20 of 44 posts
Re: Elixir at Ramp
#12To preface, I share a lot of the same sentiments as the author. My Elixir was Scala - learned it inside and out, then picked up Akka which taught me a lot of neat Erlang-derived principles. My favorite quote is "Make it work, make it right, make it fast," which is very close to the Armstrong comic. Having said that, I would not recommend Elixir or Scala or anything similar for startups. The 3 main reasons: 1) It's a…
> I would not recommend Elixir or Scala or anything similar for startups. What about for not-startups (whatever those are)? I'm attempting to use Elixir for a new component of a kind of startup like product in a 50 year old company. So kinda startupie, kind very not. But more generally, I'm curious what changes with the "for startups" qualifier?
Are you looking for product market fit? If so, you need to focus on that and not scaling.
If you have a guaranteed internal market so you need to launch with scale, then that’s more important
Re: Elixir at Ramp
#13To preface, I share a lot of the same sentiments as the author. My Elixir was Scala - learned it inside and out, then picked up Akka which taught me a lot of neat Erlang-derived principles. My favorite quote is "Make it work, make it right, make it fast," which is very close to the Armstrong comic. Having said that, I would not recommend Elixir or Scala or anything similar for startups. The 3 main reasons: 1) It's a…
' My Elixir was Scala '
So...not Elixir.
I think your first and third bullets are correct, but not entirely relevant.
That is, yes, it's hard to find people that know Elixir already, but if you can take a dev and get them competent in two weeks does it matter? Your experience with Scala != experience with Elixir.
Likewise, when it comes to ecosystem - maybe it matters, maybe it doesn't. In Scala you can leverage the JVM; I feel like the ecosystem isn't really a problem then. In Elixir, you have a lot of things available both natively in Elixir, and in Erlang. Less than the JVM, for sure, but unless your problem domain includes something that doesn't exist for Elixir, it doesn't matter.
For your second...that seems more how you write code than your language choice. And a claim that Erlang/Elixir's approach to 'let it fail' means you are spending too much time writing robust code seems...false; if anything it's less than having to catch and think about Java's checked exceptions, let alone if you ever ask "wait, what happens if we go off the happy path here?"
Re: Elixir at Ramp
#14To preface, I share a lot of the same sentiments as the author. My Elixir was Scala - learned it inside and out, then picked up Akka which taught me a lot of neat Erlang-derived principles. My favorite quote is "Make it work, make it right, make it fast," which is very close to the Armstrong comic. Having said that, I would not recommend Elixir or Scala or anything similar for startups. The 3 main reasons: 1) It's a…
> I would not recommend Elixir or Scala or anything similar for startups. What about for not-startups (whatever those are)? I'm attempting to use Elixir for a new component of a kind of startup like product in a 50 year old company. So kinda startupie, kind very not. But more generally, I'm curious what changes with the "for startups" qualifier?
What are you hoping to gain by using Elixir? I used it in a non-startup years back specifically because of the reliability; we needed a system that, for all intents and purposes, did not go down, and we needed to build and support it with a small team. It worked beautifully for that.
Re: Elixir at Ramp
#15To preface, I share a lot of the same sentiments as the author. My Elixir was Scala - learned it inside and out, then picked up Akka which taught me a lot of neat Erlang-derived principles. My favorite quote is "Make it work, make it right, make it fast," which is very close to the Armstrong comic. Having said that, I would not recommend Elixir or Scala or anything similar for startups. The 3 main reasons: 1) It's a…
I think you should have better hiring practices if you think people you’re hiring can’t learn new things. Ideally you want your employees learning to be better all the while.
There are also upsides that you have to weigh up when choosing a language. I don’t find your arguments particularly persuasive.
Re: Elixir at Ramp
#16To preface, I share a lot of the same sentiments as the author. My Elixir was Scala - learned it inside and out, then picked up Akka which taught me a lot of neat Erlang-derived principles. My favorite quote is "Make it work, make it right, make it fast," which is very close to the Armstrong comic. Having said that, I would not recommend Elixir or Scala or anything similar for startups. The 3 main reasons: 1) It's a…
So what do you recommend? Rust? JS? TS? Java? C++?
I'd not recommend Scala for other reasons: being multi paradigm makes it hard to learn, read, re-read and collaborate on. Kotlin would be a more sensible choice on the JVM imho (no implicit nulls, fully OO at the core with FP where it makes sense in that context, sum-types, exhaustiveness checks, no exception/annotation frenzy like Java).
And Erlang misses types. Gleam[1] looks cool, and seems to be picking up steam.
Rust is an amazing choice if you need that kind of low-level control over performance in all it's dimensions (except built times).
Re: Elixir at Ramp
#17To preface, I share a lot of the same sentiments as the author. My Elixir was Scala - learned it inside and out, then picked up Akka which taught me a lot of neat Erlang-derived principles. My favorite quote is "Make it work, make it right, make it fast," which is very close to the Armstrong comic. Having said that, I would not recommend Elixir or Scala or anything similar for startups. The 3 main reasons: 1) It's a…
So what do you recommend? Rust? JS? TS? Java? C++? I'd not recommend Scala for other reasons: being multi paradigm makes it hard to learn, read, re-read and collaborate on. Kotlin would be a more sensible choice on the JVM imho (no implicit nulls, fully OO at the core with FP where it makes sense in that context, sum-types, exhaustiveness checks, no exception/annotation frenzy like Java). And Erlang misses types. Gle…
The problem with Scala is that it's a huge language and it gives you a lot of ways to misbehave. It is the same exact problem that C++ has - too many people turn it into an intellectual exercise and a dick-measuring contest of who can write the most elegant (unreadable) code. If you ignore all that, Scala is an amazing language.
Re: Elixir at Ramp
#18To preface, I share a lot of the same sentiments as the author. My Elixir was Scala - learned it inside and out, then picked up Akka which taught me a lot of neat Erlang-derived principles. My favorite quote is "Make it work, make it right, make it fast," which is very close to the Armstrong comic. Having said that, I would not recommend Elixir or Scala or anything similar for startups. The 3 main reasons: 1) It's a…
> Expect a lot of on-the-job training that’s more challenging than you’d think since these languages/frameworks are different paradigms.
“Different” than what? Its not the 1990s where everyone learns only C++/Java-style static class-based OOP anymore.
> I worked at a well-known everyday consumer tech company where the payments platform went down for the better part of a day as people scrambled to figure out what went wrong. Noone had read the de-facto Scala bible which warned that catching `Throwable` could break your code.
That’s a pretty horrid example for “Scala is a hiring problem because its a different paradigm”; lesson one for exception handling in every language I’ve used that has exceptions is never catch everything, only catch specific exceptions that you know what to do with. And in virtually every language, catch-everything is a minefield waiting to blow up in your face.
Re: Elixir at Ramp
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
So what do you recommend? Rust? JS? TS? Java? C++? I'd not recommend Scala for other reasons: being multi paradigm makes it hard to learn, read, re-read and collaborate on. Kotlin would be a more sensible choice on the JVM imho (no implicit nulls, fully OO at the core with FP where it makes sense in that context, sum-types, exhaustiveness checks, no exception/annotation frenzy like Java). And Erlang misses types. Gle…
The problem with Scala is that it's a huge language and it gives you a lot of ways to misbehave. It is the same exact problem that C++ has - too many people turn it into an intellectual exercise and a dick-measuring contest of who can write the most elegant (unreadable) code. If you ignore all that, Scala is an amazing language.
This is exactly my experience. Like C++, a Scala project needs a document describing what parts of the languages should not be used, or avoided in most cases.
There is a great danger in this. Hence I prefer a language that is smaller and helps me to avoid cruft being checked in to version control. Linters are a solution, I've seen it work in JS/TS project. Not sure if C++/Scala have linters up to the feature level of JS/TS linters.
Re: Elixir at Ramp
#20To preface, I share a lot of the same sentiments as the author. My Elixir was Scala - learned it inside and out, then picked up Akka which taught me a lot of neat Erlang-derived principles. My favorite quote is "Make it work, make it right, make it fast," which is very close to the Armstrong comic. Having said that, I would not recommend Elixir or Scala or anything similar for startups. The 3 main reasons: 1) It's a…
As someone at a startup that is in Elixir, we haven't found 1 or 3 to be a problem.
I would recommend Elixir for a startup.
I made a similar comment on a previous article about Elixir: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27194517