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Why Elixir Is the Best Language for Building a Bootstrapped, B2B SaaS in 2024

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Re: Why Elixir Is the Best Language for Building a Bootstrapped, B2B SaaS in 2024

#101

Post by TheCapeGreek »

stanmancan wrote: post #92
unethical_ban wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What took you away from Louisville (laravel as my tts heard it)?

I used it for 5ish years and never felt like I really understood the framework; there way too much magic going on. What forced the switch was using Livewire; cool idea but horrible performance, poor documentation, no support, and constant rewrites. Knowing it was based off of Live View I looked into that and there was no going back.

Livewire was rewritten once for V2 -> V3 iirc?

I'm glad you found something that works better for you, but I wouldn't say that not learning to use the framework (which you don't need to understand the internals for to use) automatically makes the other option better. It just means Elixir clicked for you better.

Re: Why Elixir Is the Best Language for Building a Bootstrapped, B2B SaaS in 2024

#102

Post by TheCapeGreek »

melon_taeppe wrote: post #59

the django admin panel alone makes it a better framework for a bootstrapped app

It's neat that Django has that, I've toyed around with it, but for rapidly bootstrapping internal tools I still think Laravel does it better with either Nova, or these days preferably Filament.

Re: Why Elixir Is the Best Language for Building a Bootstrapped, B2B SaaS in 2024

#103

Post by sharts »

karmajunkie wrote: post #4

i have to be honest: as a lover of the language, and with due respect to the author, i’m really tired of these “why i picked elixir” takes extolling the same virtues (or some subset thereof) we’ve seen written up in darn near every introductory article on elixir for the last five or six years. it’s not that i think they’re wrong, at all. it’s just that they add nothing new to the conversation, they’re superficial, an…

It's like why I cleaned my butt with this less than popular toilet paper. Like, we get it. It actually was great maybe even better than the name brand one. But at the end of the day, you still gotta wipe.

Re: Why Elixir Is the Best Language for Building a Bootstrapped, B2B SaaS in 2024

#104

Post by cultofmetatron »

mbesto wrote: post #28
karmajunkie wrote: post #4

i have to be honest: as a lover of the language, and with due respect to the author, i’m really tired of these “why i picked elixir” takes extolling the same virtues (or some subset thereof) we’ve seen written up in darn near every introductory article on elixir for the last five or six years. it’s not that i think they’re wrong, at all. it’s just that they add nothing new to the conversation, they’re superficial, an…

Long story short from a business perspective - good luck logistically scaling a dev team from 2 founders to 100 devs as quickly as your app does. Elixir devs are hard to find and are expensive.

> good luck logistically scaling a dev team from 2 founders to 100 devs

You'll never need 100 devs to work on a single elixir project. I as a solo dev built out the backend for my startup to profitable. We keep discussing bringing on a new developer during the occasional crunch but its been 5 years of operation and we haven't really needed it aside from increasing the bus factor. features go out fast enough as is. elixir is very productive.

based on my experience, if you need more than 5 developers, you should separate out features to independent systems and have them communicate with each other over established interfaces. Then you can use the language specialized to the task at hand. Either way, 100 engineers on a single codebase is not going to be efficient no matter what language you are working in.

That said, this article is about startup. the name of the game is to crank out features and aquire users. elixir is performant enough that you're not blowing your budget on cloud infrastructure and high level enough that you can build out and maintain your mvp with a skeleton crew.

If you run into a situation where you suddenly need to scale to 100 engineers, thats a great problem. it means you have revenue.

Re: Why Elixir Is the Best Language for Building a Bootstrapped, B2B SaaS in 2024

#105

Post by pythonaut_16 »

pdimitar wrote: post #68
dalyons wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like you just dont want to work at a startup? What does that have to do with elixir?

Yes I don't want to work for a startup and I stated as much didn't I? ;) What it has to do with Elixir is that Elixir does not scale well with a number of programmers, and many startups go through periods of explosive growth of personnel. With Elixir that very rarely works well, 99% of the time IMO it does not. Adding more people does not increase productivity, it hurts it even.

Do you think that’s inherent to the language, or a result of common patterns?

How do other languages, like Python, scale better to more devs, besides more devs available? All that comes to mind immediately is modules in Elixir being globally available, but I’m genuinely curios about your experiences.

Re: Why Elixir Is the Best Language for Building a Bootstrapped, B2B SaaS in 2024

#106

Post by pdimitar »

pythonaut_16 wrote: post #105
pdimitar wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes I don't want to work for a startup and I stated as much didn't I? ;) What it has to do with Elixir is that Elixir does not scale well with a number of programmers, and many startups go through periods of explosive growth of personnel. With Elixir that very rarely works well, 99% of the time IMO it does not. Adding more people does not increase productivity, it hurts it even.

Do you think that’s inherent to the language, or a result of common patterns? How do other languages, like Python, scale better to more devs, besides more devs available? All that comes to mind immediately is modules in Elixir being globally available, but I’m genuinely curios about your experiences.

It's mostly related to the fact that Elixir code is very terse and easy to understand, and that if you put 100 devs on a singular Phoenix web/API project codebase they will be stepping on each others' toes all the time so they need to kind of take turns if they don't want the codebase to become a complete mess.

Thirdly, Elixir devs are on average quite senior in general (as they are usually refugees from other stacks) which lends itself to one-man armies very well in my almost 8 years of experience working with Elixir.

Re: Why Elixir Is the Best Language for Building a Bootstrapped, B2B SaaS in 2024

#107

Post by anonyfox »

mbesto wrote: post #28
karmajunkie wrote: post #4

i have to be honest: as a lover of the language, and with due respect to the author, i’m really tired of these “why i picked elixir” takes extolling the same virtues (or some subset thereof) we’ve seen written up in darn near every introductory article on elixir for the last five or six years. it’s not that i think they’re wrong, at all. it’s just that they add nothing new to the conversation, they’re superficial, an…

Long story short from a business perspective - good luck logistically scaling a dev team from 2 founders to 100 devs as quickly as your app does. Elixir devs are hard to find and are expensive.

I have hired elixir devs recently, even worse: onsite only, and couldn't help myself with all the applications. And it wasn't like when hiring JS devs that I had to weed out the majority of super-junior candidates first. All around the statement of "hard to find devs" doesn't hold anymore as it used to. Just as a data point. And from the community often a saying is that there aren't enough Elixir jobs to begin with, so thats another story.

Having said that, a single team of seasoned Elixir devs can achieve more/better things than 100 average devs using the usual SPA/API/microservices-JS hell with all that modern unneccessary complexity. Saying this as a former DevOps guy babysitting the mess of multiple of these teams before.

Re: Why Elixir Is the Best Language for Building a Bootstrapped, B2B SaaS in 2024

#108

Post by weatherlight »

elicksaur wrote: post #80
3dpancake wrote: post #73

I am really missing out on the Elixir hype. And Phoenix has liveview, so the htmx hype gets multiplied with the Elixir hype? This article provides a huge list of things you have to know for web dev. Certainly not all of them a required. And of the ones you will have to know to accomplish your task, you'll still have to learn the Elixir flavor of it. My current job is rewriting what is basically a crud elixir app in p…

fwiw Python also has pattern matching: https://benhoyt.com/writings/python-pattern-matching/

ruby does too. its not remotely the same

Re: Why Elixir Is the Best Language for Building a Bootstrapped, B2B SaaS in 2024

#110

Post by weatherlight »

pdimitar wrote: post #106
pythonaut_16 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think that’s inherent to the language, or a result of common patterns? How do other languages, like Python, scale better to more devs, besides more devs available? All that comes to mind immediately is modules in Elixir being globally available, but I’m genuinely curios about your experiences.

It's mostly related to the fact that Elixir code is very terse and easy to understand, and that if you put 100 devs on a singular Phoenix web/API project codebase they will be stepping on each others' toes all the time so they need to kind of take turns if they don't want the codebase to become a complete mess. Thirdly, Elixir devs are on average quite senior in general (as they are usually refugees from other stacks…

Is it any different than Ruby in this manner? I've worked at companies with 60 ruby engineers we do fine. It's called writing tests.

Does stepping on each other's toes happen, of course! but no worse than typescript, java, etc.

I don't buy this argument.

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