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I agree, I wasn't trying to imply otherwise. It's just that static typing is the first thing that looks like a theoretical trade-off of Elixir based on my experience, and I was curious why it doesn't feel that way in practice.
Structs and pattern matching help quite a bit.
The video is hilarious in a good way. You can hear the disbelief and amazement in Chris McCord's voice when Liveview works as he (and team) developed it.
I agree that it's fun to witness that level of passion and it makes me happy that Chris is so amped about this.
I was a Rails user for almost a decade. I switched to Phoenix/Elixir 3 years ago. Elixir is a super simple language. It has no OO concepts and everything is functions first. In fact, it's so good that I started teaching it for universities. All my production web applications are now fully on Elixir. Elixir is one of those languages where everything has been done perfectly as of the time of this comment. When I say pe…
Including GenServers? I find writing GenServers to be needlessly painful. Their syntax is one of my least favorite things about Elixir.
I'm a big fan, Elixir + Phoenix is excellent enough, and LiveView is what really sealed the deal for me as the perfect web development stack. It's simple, it's fast, it works. Sure, it has a few rough spots that have to be worked around when you start to push its limits, but as this blog post showed it's perfect to quickly have a working web application by completely skipping having to write client-side code. I developed a couple of prototypes and single-use applications in hours that with any other stack would have taken me days. Hell, I'd argue that in some cases it took me less time to complete my app with LiveView than it would have taken me to setup Webpack with Frontend Framework.
I don't believe it to be a silver bullet for sure, and it has to prove its worth at scale, but it gives excellent results with little effort, and honestly the reduced tedium is worth it on its own.
Also, protip: try LiveView with Tailwind CSS.
I was a Rails user for almost a decade. I switched to Phoenix/Elixir 3 years ago. Elixir is a super simple language. It has no OO concepts and everything is functions first. In fact, it's so good that I started teaching it for universities. All my production web applications are now fully on Elixir. Elixir is one of those languages where everything has been done perfectly as of the time of this comment. When I say pe…
That is interesting.
I've gone from Geocities pages to ASP Classic, PHP, WP, Rails, Flask and have been dabbling with Elixir and Phoenix for a bit.
So far LiveView (and some bits of Elixir in general) has been the only time in my career where I felt like I'm seriously struggling hard to understand how things come together and how to solve real but fairly common web dev problems without asking for help (mainly with LV). I've had to ask for help on IRC / the forums an embarrassing amount of times. Where as with Rails and Flask almost everything except the most crazy problems were solvable with a little bit of Googling and self exploration.
Now, I'm not saying Elixir and Phoenix is bad at all. I'm still happily using it to build my next big project (for all of the reasons that everyone else uses it for), and the Programming Phoenix book is a great learning resource for building regular web apps with Phoenix, but there's nothing like that for LiveView.
But on the bright side, Chris (the author of Phoenix) and Jose (the author of Elixir) are remarkably responsive to help the community. Lots of other folks are super helpful too. That and once things start to click, you can write some really pleasant looking code and actually understand what it does a few months later.
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I 100% agree about Elixir and its surrounding ecosystem being almost perfect. It's insane how simple the building blocks are and how easy the code is to read and write. Here are a few pain points I've ran into: 1. Typespecs leave something to be desired compared to other type systems 2. Maps vs structs and easily using one in place of the other Things that my team would like to see: 1. Components in addition to templ…
If you are interested in a React like component library built on top of LiveView you should check out Surface http://surface-demo.msaraiva.io/
Surface is a server-side rendering component library that allows developers to build rich interactive user-interfaces, writing minimal custom Javascript.
Features: * An HTML-centric templating language with built-in directives (:for, :if, ...) and syntactic sugar for attributes (inspired by Vue.js). * Components as modules - they can be stateless, stateful, renderless or compile-time. * Declarative properties - explicitly declare the inputs (properties and events) of each component. * Slots - placeholders declared by a component that you can fill up with custom content. * Contexts - allows a parent component to share data with its children without passing them as properties.. * Compile-time checking of components and their properties. * Integration with editor/tools for warnings/errors, syntax highlighting, jump-to-definition, auto-completion (soon!) and more.
I was a Rails user for almost a decade. I switched to Phoenix/Elixir 3 years ago. Elixir is a super simple language. It has no OO concepts and everything is functions first. In fact, it's so good that I started teaching it for universities. All my production web applications are now fully on Elixir. Elixir is one of those languages where everything has been done perfectly as of the time of this comment. When I say pe…
Are there any good tutorials to get started? What major sites are currently using Elixir?
Besides what was listed already, if you're looking for info on people running Elixir / Phoenix in production there's this podcast: https://runninginproduction.com/tags/phoenix
One guy was pumping over 7 billion log events a month through it.
Another one (remote.com episode) serves 100k+ daily requests.
Each podcast episode goes through how the app was built and how it's deployed at a high level, but still has enough details to apply those things back to your own projects.
With that said, if anyone is running Elixir or Phoenix in production and sees this and wants to be on the show, just head over to the above link and click "become a guest" on the top right. I'd love to have you on, both big and small sites are welcome.
We are really excited about this release! I also wanted the screencast to be a single take, so I'm happy to answer questions if there are gaps to fill in for things I could have explained more clearly.
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Are there any good tutorials to get started? What major sites are currently using Elixir?
The Elixir video courses at https://pragmaticstudio.com/ are the best available, in my opinion. There are some free tutorials available and some other good paid courses, to be sure, but I think Mike and Nicole over at Pragmatic Studio offer the most complete and easy-to-follow courses available. The cost-to-value ratio of their courses is really good, I think. I'm not affiliated with them in any way. I'm just a happy…