Would you still pick Elixir in 2019? • Hacker News Board

Re: Would you still pick Elixir in 2019?

#31

Post by artellectual » Sun, Jan 06, 2019, 3:08 PM UTC

I’ve been programming in elixir for about 2 years now. I have to say it’s hard to go back to something like Ruby or JavaScript.

In elixir you really get the full power of multi core and support for distributed computing out of the box.

Code that would have been beyond my pay grade or wouldn’t even imagine to write in Ruby or JavaScript is now easily reasoned about and maintained in projects. I can write succinct code that is easy to read, is fast, able to take advantage of multiple cores, less error prone, which I can scale to multiple machines easily.

The erlang scheduler is so damn powerful and it feels amazing to be able to execute your code on multiple machines with a simple distributed task which is built in as a standard functionality of the language.

I’ll end this note saying that, look at the problem you are trying to solve. If you need multi core and distributed features (which is generally more common than you think) elixir is truly your friend.

I can say without a shadow of a doubt the project I’m building right now would not be progressing as fast as it is if I picked anything other than Elixir. You get a lot of bang for your buck when it comes to productivity in the domain that elixir solves for.

Re: Would you still pick Elixir in 2019?

#32

Post by rsynnott » Sun, Jan 06, 2019, 3:09 PM UTC

andrenth wrote: post #5

What an awkward introduction with the ideological pronouns.

You mean the use of singular they? Absolutely standard English, and nothing ideological about it.

Re: Would you still pick Elixir in 2019?

#33

Post by andrenth » Sun, Jan 06, 2019, 3:12 PM UTC

rsynnott wrote: post #32

andrenth wrote: post #5

What an awkward introduction with the ideological pronouns.

You mean the use of singular they? Absolutely standard English, and nothing ideological about it.

Only with an indeterminate subject. Definitely not the case here.

Re: Would you still pick Elixir in 2019?

#34

Post by hnra » Sun, Jan 06, 2019, 3:12 PM UTC

trashhalo wrote: post #20

I keep wanting to be hyped about elixer but the performance benchmarks confuse me. If you look at the tech emperor benchmarks[1] phoenix makes the list at #46 registering 16% of the performance of the top framework. I'm willing to sacrifice performance for readable maintainable code but it just surprises me that its that slow. Anyone know whats going on there? 1. https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r…

Simply looking at its position in that list will tell you nothing without looking at what is above and below. I don't use Phoenix or Elixir but from what I understand Phoenix tries to be for Elixir what Rails is for Ruby. That is, it is a full web framework. The number one position on that list is a "Asynchronous PostgreSQL driver".

This would be a more apt comparison:

https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r17&hw=...

Re: Would you still pick Elixir in 2019?

#35

Post by nixpulvis » Sun, Jan 06, 2019, 3:13 PM UTC

Tangent: It's proposed that Elixir has better error handling than Rust... but this doesn't sit well with me, and I know the Rust community is in flux here as well. I personally like not having exceptions. It's very easy to trace where an error is coming from when it's a value like anything else. Yea it might be a bit more typing... this is the conflict. Rust does have an issue with the boilerplate involved with writing error types, but there are already attempts at fixing this as a crate: https://github.com/rust-lang-nursery/failure

Re: Would you still pick Elixir in 2019?

#36

Post by sb8244 » Sun, Jan 06, 2019, 3:19 PM UTC

I've been fortunate to work with a CTO that sees the value in Elixir and also letting us push forward with it. It has been excellent. At this point we have about 20 engineers who have chosen to work in it close to full time for their services.

It's hard to pick one big draw, but I'd say the biggest for me is that everything I wanted to do in rails has been possible in Elixir and then additional functionality not easily possible in rails is trivial in Elixir. I often consider the distribution techniques as "enhancers" as you could work around them with global locks and data stores, but you don't need to.

I'm very bullish on Elixir and I'm curious to see where it will go. Looking forward to giving my talk about bringing Elixir into production (from a human and technical standpoint) at Lonestar Elixir conference.

Re: Would you still pick Elixir in 2019?

#37

Post by marcinzm » Sun, Jan 06, 2019, 3:20 PM UTC

IloveHN84 wrote: post #27

symboltoproc wrote: post #17

The JavaScript Fatigue argument is not good. There's simply no data that backs it and nobody is forced to use new libraries only because they use JavaScript. I've seen third party dependencies churn on Elixir as well (packages that are no longer maintained or alternatives that are better) - I think it's an inherent problem with using dependencies and has nothing to do with the programming language in which those depe…

"backend" and "JavaScript" quite don't fit together in the same phrase. I would never work on backend with JavaScript or any other interpreted language, due to error proness.

You're free not to work on backend javascript (or other interpreted languages) but many people would (and do) disagree with you.

Re: Would you still pick Elixir in 2019?

#38

Post by cjhanks » Sun, Jan 06, 2019, 3:22 PM UTC

I guess I feel like the annoying formatting is indicative of the community, immature.

Web developers seem to follow trends; Perl -> DJango|RoR -> Node.JS -> Scala -> GoLang -> Elixir -> Something. Or, something like that. To me, it's like buying a $500 pencil and expecting that you should be capable of writing a better book.

If you get in bed with that crowd, don't expect that your program and 3rd party dependencies are going to be stable in 2 years.

Re: Would you still pick Elixir in 2019?

#39

Post by therealmarv » Sun, Jan 06, 2019, 3:29 PM UTC

Elixir is a niche (that's the truth). Also in the article it is written 'Relatively difficult to "recruit" developers with existing experience in Elixir'.

Why would a SW company invest in niche languages where the resources (software developers) are really expensive and really hard to get? Technologically it's all great but economically that's a nightmare.

Re: Would you still pick Elixir in 2019?

#40

Post by sb8244 » Sun, Jan 06, 2019, 3:30 PM UTC

cjhanks wrote: post #38

I guess I feel like the annoying formatting is indicative of the community, immature. Web developers seem to follow trends; Perl -> DJango|RoR -> Node.JS -> Scala -> GoLang -> Elixir -> Something. Or, something like that. To me, it's like buying a $500 pencil and expecting that you should be capable of writing a better book. If you get in bed with that crowd, don't expect that your program and 3rd party dependencies…

A lot of individuals I've seen in the community so far haven't been the type to quickly jump onto a trend. People have been thoughtful with their application design and have chosen Elixir instead of alternatives. Given how drastically different the BEAM is from these other languages, I have a hard time seeing some of the people I've met (and myself) jump to something else. My guess is that if it does happen to others, it is because they switched jobs and cannot get buy in.

Pretty unfounded comments regarding stability of packages long term. As with any community that makes it easy to publish packages, there will certainly be package churn over time. However, core libraries show 0 sign of this and Phoenix in particular has taken a very mature stance on new features.