Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

sleepeasy.app

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 142 posts

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

#131

Post by pdimitar »

rio517 wrote: post #120
pdimitar wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(EDIT: To clarify, my comment is only a response to "not that easy to find Elixir devs for a startup") --- I don't speak for anyone except myself and a few acquaintances but I wouldn't accept an offer to work on a startup with Elixir unless we're talking at least $15,000 a month or more. And even then it depends a lot on team and company culture. I am tired of sprinting without that ever being connected to me getting…

Isn't this concern independent of the language? > Requiring me to churn out 3-5 features a week in the first 6 months is the best way for me to hand my resignation a mere two weeks after starting.

Actually no it isn't, I was indeed mixing Elixir and non-Elixir concerns in one comment.

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

#132

Post by pdimitar »

sb8244 wrote: post #122
pdimitar wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This doesn't track with my experience. We scaled an org with both Ruby and Elixir (later, 1 of the 2 blessed languages) and there was no tangible difference in that way. You could also scale in other ways like microservice. Elixir plays great in that world, as pretty much every language does. Regarding one man armies. Usual way I've seen to scale is to find those one man armies and put less expensive Jr + mid enginee…

Hard to argue against anecdotal evidence one way or the other -- my view is probably skewed because I usually avoid big companies.

RE: microservices, yep, that's one of the ways to scale Elixir teams to more people indeed.

RE: one-man armies, agreed.

> I'm not trying to sell Elixir here. I think it has benefits in smaller org size that mellow out and equalize as a company grows.

No worries, I am sold for 8 years now. ;)

And yes, the benefits kind of plateau from one dev count and up I found. That was kind of the core of my comment, too.

> Also, startups should always work in whatever language is most comfortable to founding team.

Oh, absolutely. I love Elixir a lot but won't shill for it if I find myself in a situation where it would be a bad choice. Plus in startups development speed is probably the biggest asset of the programmers so I am not judging. (Though I don't want to work for startups anymore.)

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

#133

Post by pdimitar »

weatherlight wrote: post #110
pdimitar wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's 50/50 and really depends on the people, this is just my 8-year old experience, I don't make it as an argument that's truthful beyond any doubt.

There is also the fact that the companies I chose to work with didn't want a lot of Elixir devs and we truly made miracles happen with teams of 2 to 8 people.

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

#134

Post by stanmancan »

TheCapeGreek wrote: post #101
stanmancan wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Laravel really forces you to do things the "Laravel way" and as soon as you try to step outside that box you run into tons of headaches along the way, and upgrades become painful. I haven't found that to be the case with Phoenix at all.

There's also lots of "magic" going in in Laravel behind the scenes and it can be pretty painful to try and figure out exactly why something happened.

Livewire was a mess over all. It had a lot of breaking changes along the way and performance was terrible for anything but the most basic tasks. The support was poor; the docs were alright at best, the screencasts were paid, and Caleb never showed his face in his own Discord, which was troublesome because there weren't enough people using it for the community to support each other. The weird bugs and behaviour were all over the place and the errors you received when you ran into one of them did nothing to help you track it down.

I guess to sum up my feelings: PHP was fine but Elixir did click better. Laravel is a black box and Phoenix is objectively a better framework.

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

#135

Post by stanmancan »

pier25 wrote: post #94
stanmancan wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Live View is SO much better it’s not even close. It’s faster, more reliable, easier to use, way less weird gotchas.

Since you left Laravel about two years ago you only used LiveWire v1, correct? I haven't used it myself but apparently v3 solved plenty of weird gotchas.

The last Laravel project I used was using Livewire V2.

Not all of the problems were strictly "Livewire" problems, but also just the limitations of PHP. Having to send the state back and forward and rehydrate the state on the server on every request is just slow no matter what you do. Live View has an active process for every connected user that maintains state so you only have to send tiny little diff's back and forward.

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

#136

Post by MainlyMortal »

Zababa wrote: post #130

Is it worth it to learn Elixir (including Phoenix, and I would guess some Postgres) to be able to rapidly build websites? My day job is mostly Go microservices, making anything this way takes a lot of time and doesn't really feel worth it for single-person projects.

[dead]

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

#137

Post by pier25 »

stanmancan wrote: post #135
pier25 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since you left Laravel about two years ago you only used LiveWire v1, correct? I haven't used it myself but apparently v3 solved plenty of weird gotchas.

The last Laravel project I used was using Livewire V2. Not all of the problems were strictly "Livewire" problems, but also just the limitations of PHP. Having to send the state back and forward and rehydrate the state on the server on every request is just slow no matter what you do. Live View has an active process for every connected user that maintains state so you only have to send tiny little diff's back and forw…

Do LiveWire responses get so big that the size becomes an issue?

Haven't used either LiveWire or LiveViews seriously. Honestly trying to understand what you're saying.

I was under the impression LiveWire only sent the data for the component being updated so realistically the main issue is latency (just as with LiveViews).

I mean, sending 0.1kB vs 1kB is 10x worse but in practice this doesn't seem like it would have a real impact in UX for the majority of use cases.

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

#138

Post by elicksaur »

weatherlight wrote: post #108
elicksaur wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

ruby does too. its not remotely the same

What are you saying isn’t the same? This is a very hostile, dismissive response when I was simply pointing out Python had a similar concept in the hopes it might help the person understand something they said confused them.

As far as I can tell all three languages, Python, Elixir, Ruby, have pattern matching and the matching can set variables. Python’s has a “match” keyword. I’m not as familiar with Ruby, but I know it uses “case”.

I like Elixir’s the best because it’s not just what I would call a fancy switch statement. You can use it on single lines and in function definitions. Someone else might like a different form of pattern matching better. It’s just an opinion.

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

#139

Post by dmix »

dbbk wrote: post #113

My current company uses Elixir so I've had to pick it up, and while I get the idea, man the compile times are just awful. Our full app takes a good 15 minutes to build locally. And I don't know why, but I've had so many times where the incremental build has become corrupt and it needs to rebuild everything. Coming from a PHP and Node background, I definitely miss the speed of development.

That does sound awful.

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

#140

Post by dmix »

elicksaur wrote: post #138
weatherlight wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ruby does too. its not remotely the same

What are you saying isn’t the same? This is a very hostile, dismissive response when I was simply pointing out Python had a similar concept in the hopes it might help the person understand something they said confused them. As far as I can tell all three languages, Python, Elixir, Ruby, have pattern matching and the matching can set variables. Python’s has a “match” keyword. I’m not as familiar with Ruby, but I know…

Pattern matching is fundamental to programming in elixir/Erlang the way go channels are in Go and super clean metaprogramming interfaces are in Ruby or types are in Haskell etc, you can do those things in other languages but when it's fundamental to the design of the language itself it filters down (or up) to every layer, where it significantly impacts how useful/powerful it is.

Elixirs pattern matching is the one thing I wish every language had from day one. Besides maybe an Optional/Maybe concept for error handling / data enclosures.

It makes for some very readable code and encourages passing return values that are easily consumed in a simple/functional way. Not capturing random error objects or unpredictable data structures.

Although I'm biased towards functional style, even though I code JS/Ruby for a living.

Post reply on HN