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Ask HN: Who regrets choosing Elixir?

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Re: Ask HN: Who regrets choosing Elixir?

#231

Post by [deleted] »

nell wrote: post #146
rlander wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, if you’re rewriting an Erlang system in Python/JS and you don’t feel like you’re losing much, Erlang was the wrong choice from the beginning. The cases were Erlang shines are very hard to replicate in these languages.

> The cases were Erlang shines are very hard to replicate in these languages. I'm just beginning to get interested in the Erlang ecosystem. Could you please add more color to this and give some examples where Erlang shines? IIRC, Whatsapp backend used to be on Erlang.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Who regrets choosing Elixir?

#232

Post by tpxl »

rixed wrote: post #187
tpxl wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW I agree with you. I'm a Java dev and learning a language that's similar to it (C, C#, Python, whatever) does nothing for me but take away from learning more of my language. Other comments say an engineer is supposed to solve issues with the tools given to them. I can solve issues in other languages, I just don't want to. How does that make me a bad engineer?

For one, because you select your tools and reject others not based on their rational merits. Second, because you are also likely to favor recruitment of other devs based on this cultural choice not on their merit, eventually creating a clique.

Productivity and working knowledge of a tool do not count as rational merits? It takes years to really learn a language; a new framework and language per week is a stupid fad.

If I run a Java shop I want a clique of Java devs, not Golang or Rust devs.

Re: Ask HN: Who regrets choosing Elixir?

#233

Post by nikofeyn »

PopeDotNinja wrote: post #88
alex55 wrote: post #80

I work for a Ruby on Rails shop and we used Elixir for two projects about a year or two ago when it was getting a lot of good press. The first project was an API that was intended to serve as a middleman between a few legacy services. Basically the company that hired us was building a new JSON API but didn't want to rewrite all their old code and our job was to consume the output from their ugly legacy APIs and produ…

> If you don't fully know the problem domain, use something with good library support. I think this is completely fair. As my friend says, "I don't know what library I'll need for every project, but I know where will be one for Python."

just because there is one doesn't mean it's quality. so then it's a worse scenario because you thought there was a solution, planned on it, but then once you use it you see it doesn't work the way you expect.

Re: Ask HN: Who regrets choosing Elixir?

#234

Post by karmakaze »

rixed wrote: post #183
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment was so spot-on that I suspected we worked at the same company for a minute. Erlang / Elixir are languages that are easy to begin learning, but difficult to master. In our case, the team was able to get the basics up and running quickly, but the service became increasingly difficult to manage as our product requirements expanded beyond the strengths of the Erlang ecosystem's core competencies. In our case…

> We're a Python shop Who decided that your company's raison d'être was to write some Python?

Caught me as an odd choice to scale an IoT backend.

Re: Ask HN: Who regrets choosing Elixir?

#235

Post by [deleted] »

icedchai wrote: post #227
carapace wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This, twice. Back in the day people would balk at hiring Python programmers saying, "there are so many more Java programmers", and I used to say, "Why would you hire a Java programmer who was unwilling or unable to learn Python?" Same logic applies here: Why would you hire a Python programmer who was unwilling or unable to learn Erlang? (Especially if you're going to pay them to do it!) If you can't switch languages…

If I had a Python job (a language I enjoy) and I was forced to work in a language I don't (say, Perl), I'd start complaining about it and looking for something else to do. I personally wouldn't mind working with Erlang, but that isn't the point. Many developers "can" do these things but it doesn't mean they want to.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Who regrets choosing Elixir?

#236

Post by scull7 »

maxwindiff wrote: post #200
cosmotic wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why?

This kind of sentiment come up every so often on HN and I'm just sick of it. Sure, programmers should strive to improve their craft, just like professionals in every industry. But there are plenty of ways to improve yourself and learning a new language is hardly the most effective choice (and in fact could be counterproductive).

How does learning a new way to think about a problem become counterproductive? Each language you learn gives you a new angle from which you can approach a problem. Is it counter productive to learn a second spoken language? I haven’t come across an argument against that, even learning a dead language like Latin or Ancient Greek has benefits.

Re: Ask HN: Who regrets choosing Elixir?

#237

Post by sghill »

as-j wrote: post #92

TL;DNR, use a language your company can support. It doesn't matter how suited to the job a language is, if it's single Engineer or small team, what happens when they move on? How do you support it? Who's on call? Not Elixir, but a cautionary tale from our Erlang project. ~8 years ago a our IoT backend was written in Erlang, this was the early days of IoT, so sure it made sense as a technology, could scale well, handl…

> Does this new language save you that much over using a more generic and widly known language in the org?

This is a great question to ask. It’s worth extending beyond language to frameworks and libraries as well.

It’s important to optimize for the development experience across all the apps in a team. Especially once the excitement of using a new language is gone and there are bugs to fix.

I‘ve rewritten a few projects in a common language for the org. Each time the biggest benefit was how straightforward it became to work on. Problems you’ve found somewhere else become easy to spot (and search for). Writing another test is the same as the last project you had open. Anyone in the org can contribute with a minimal learning curve. This can be the difference in getting bugs fixed in a day or a month.

Re: Ask HN: Who regrets choosing Elixir?

#238

Post by iloveitaly »

I really enjoy Elixir. I've used for a fun side project. It's an awesome language with some really interesting concepts.

However, I wouldn't use it for a real project:

1. The ecosystem doesn't compare to ruby/python/javascript. There's a lot of missing packages and abandoned libraries. I ended up having patch a bunch of libraries I used.

2. The tooling that exists is nice and 'just works' but there's a lot that's missing from ruby land: https://elixirforum.com/t/help-an-elixir-beginner-find-missi...

3. The deployment story is horrible. The heroku/dokku buildpacks didn't work by default and it's not obvious how you can easily deploy a mix/distillery release without writing your own deploy scripts. https://elixirforum.com/t/official-heroku-dokku-buildpack/28...

4. Phoenix != Rails. There's many many obvious things that are missing. `mail_to` for example.

Re: Ask HN: Who regrets choosing Elixir?

#239

Post by blandflakes »

jeremyjh wrote: post #154
sanderjd wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just throwing it out there because I've had similar thoughts - that is, I enjoy Elixir but would be uneasy embarking on a large project without better static analysis, and also wonder what better fits the bill of a statically typed server application language - maybe check out Kotlin. I was very pleasantly surprised when going back to Java from Ruby that I found it much nicer, and Kotlin looks very similar but with a…

That's funny you say that - I've been following Kotlin a long time and lately have been getting interested in it again; somehow my thoughts keep leading there. If anything holds me back its my experience with Scala. I used Scala for awhile (actually it was my introduction to functional programming) and I like the language but everything about it that seemed to make me unhappy was related to the tooling and JVM ecosys…

Though I prefer Scala the language, Kotlin is really nice and has pretty straightforward tooling (seriously why is sbt what I'm stuck with), as well as really awesome (unsurprisingly) Intellij support.

Re: Ask HN: Who regrets choosing Elixir?

#240

Post by shoo »

karmakaze wrote: post #234
rixed wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We're a Python shop Who decided that your company's raison d'être was to write some Python?

Caught me as an odd choice to scale an IoT backend.

at some point you end up with path dependence -- you're in the situation you're in, and it would be big-bang rewrite or incremental migration to port all the code to a new stack, not to mention the costs of retraining existing staff to be able to effectively develop in and support the new stack, or replacing the staff with different staff who know the new stack but don't understand the existing business and code. so maybe the previous decision to pick tech stack A over tech stack B when starting the product was pretty sound given the circumstances, or maybe it wasn't, but it doesn't matter that much from the perspective of deciding what to do next.
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