How Ruby on Rails Could Be Much Better (2008) • Hacker News Board

Re: How Ruby on Rails Could Be Much Better (2008)

#61

Post by dfischer » Tue, Jul 21, 2020, 7:35 AM UTC

user34234 wrote: post #35

dfischer wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elixir is the solution to this with similar ergonomics.

The company I work for (mostly standard Web Dev) uses almost exclusively Elixir for any backend work. Only the fanboys of Elixir and functional everything are happy with it, just to be different to everyone else. The experience is terrible: Tooling (editor plugins, tests runners, IDEs (oh, there are no IDEs...), debugging) is like going back 20 years. There are no libraries for the most basic stuff you get almost by…

I’ve found the ecosystem to be quite high quality but the editor tooling does fall short sometimes. Particularly the transition from Alchemist to an editor powered by the new language server protocol.

I can’t say it’s anything other than the fault of not enough spare time. The community is a bit smaller so there are not as many volunteers to build out the latest and greatest tooling for editor support.

Despite this, I’ve had a wonderful experience working within the elixir ecosystem and using it as a gateway to erlang. One of the things I had to acknowledge was my bias towards recent updates as a measure of quality. The ecosystem is so good that you’ll find packages years old and never updated. It simply does that it does and does it well.

I found overall great support in VS Code at the end of the day for Elixir. I wanted it to work well with emacs but it wasn’t consistently enjoyable.

VS Code works well enough for now between the satisfaction of shipping code and the satisfaction of a flick of the wrist for editor commands.

Re: How Ruby on Rails Could Be Much Better (2008)

#62

Post by dfischer » Tue, Jul 21, 2020, 7:37 AM UTC

syspec wrote: post #16

dfischer wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elixir is the solution to this with similar ergonomics.

I've been experimenting with it, and it definitely has the feeling of working in rails / ruby. My only gripe is that the tooling is not as mature as rails. I use rubymine and the debugger has truly spoiled me. I tried to get the debugger going with a third party plugin for Intelli-j but it would crash when inspecting variables. Any tips?

There is not much I can comment on editor support as I’ve had the experience of both successfully and unsuccessfully using various debuggers in editors. If you jump into IEX and use the built in introspection it’s some of the most advanced tooling I’ve ever seen in any language. Especially when doing OTP-level topology.

Re: How Ruby on Rails Could Be Much Better (2008)

#63

Post by cpursley » Tue, Jul 21, 2020, 1:34 PM UTC

user34234 wrote: post #60

cpursley wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? I've been able to find everything I need in the Elixir ecosystem from auth to background jobs and one of if not the best GraphQL server implementations out there. Do you mind sharing which libraries you found missing or incomplete?

Yes, in fact we have ourselves published a few open source packages out of the need we had to build them. The latest incarnation of this problem, was when we had to validate RUT codes (a tax code with a checksum we use here in Chile). Options for Python [1], options for Node [2], options for elixir [3] (don't mind to click, it's a list with nothing to do with RUTs or modulo11 validations). So we had to implement it o…

Fair enough, thank you for sharing.

I've had good luck with VSCode but I've never really been an IDE user (even with Ruby) so I can't comment much on that.