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10 years-ish of Elixir

dashbit.co

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Re: 10 years-ish of Elixir

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks, I'm not GP but have the same questions. What about access control? That's often directly tied into business logic, but it's so elegant and convenient to do it in the controllers or even the router using the pipelines. In fact a ton of the examples (I think even the Chris McCord Phoenix book) does exactly this, presumably for that reason. However I did that with an app and haven't been very happy with it becau…

There’s already an article on this you can find here: https://dashbit.co/blog/a-new-authentication-solution-for-ph... The GitHub for the generator is here: https://github.com/aaronrenner/phx_gen_auth Basically if you need something different it might be worth forking the generator. I might look at passwordless login at some point.

phx.gen.auth has been merged and will be part of the upcoming Phoenix 1.6

Re: 10 years-ish of Elixir

#82
post #63

Meanwhile te company I work for is moving away from it. We cannot find enough people with enough knowledge to be already productive in it. Not many want to learn it because it is considered pretty niche, and the ones willing to learn will need many months or years to be productive and build with some level of quality, and once they learn they move away to bigger companies which pay more. We end up paying to people to…

I don't say this to dismiss your experience, but just to share a counterexample: I found Elixir extremely easy to learn (despite having no Ruby experience, nor any significant experience in any functional languages). I went through the (excellent) official tutorial in a couple days, skimmed parts of Saša Juric's book, and felt reasonably confident diving in to actually writing code. Within a couple weeks I felt like…

I have found Elixir as a whole to be amazing, but the debugging process to be painful. Maybe its because I'm used to using Chrome's developer tools (since I mostly debug JavaScript), but I really wish that debugging on Elixir could be simpler. Using printf's is just too painful and feels backwards.

Re: 10 years-ish of Elixir

#83

Meanwhile te company I work for is moving away from it. We cannot find enough people with enough knowledge to be already productive in it. Not many want to learn it because it is considered pretty niche, and the ones willing to learn will need many months or years to be productive and build with some level of quality, and once they learn they move away to bigger companies which pay more. We end up paying to people to…

[deleted]

Re: 10 years-ish of Elixir

#84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironically, Europe has a higher concentration of Elixirists given Erlang was invented there. My hiring attitude is that paying for senior developers is cheaper in the long run given their ability to make better decisions. > I wonder if what your team of 3 people is building couldn't have been built with just one engineer and ruby on rails at the expense of paying for two more servers. Emphatically no. Having more ser…

> While other package ecosystems certainly have _more_ packages, the question is: how many of those will you actually use? Exactly. Saying NPM has millions of packages is completely misleading. There will be 20, 30, 40 packages that all do the same thing. Elixir is also a very stable language with no current plans for a 2.0 release. This means that while a lot of Hex packages may not have been updated in a while, the…

> Exactly. Saying NPM has millions of packages is completely misleading. There will be 20, 30, 40 packages that all do the same thing.

And the one with the obvious name hasn't been updated in 18 months. Maybe it's complete. Maybe the developer has moved on. Then there are a couple half hearted forks. All of these dependencies bring in 1 to 100 dependencies each and you have to spend a days on the treadmill every month or two to keep things updated.

I loved Node development despite the packaging mess but I really appreciate how the Elixir community tends to coalesce around key libraries/frameworks/methodologies and focus on making them the best possible.

Re: 10 years-ish of Elixir

#85

it looks really awesome! Can someone point out the negative sides (or drawbacks of any kind) ? What about finding elixir experts/freelancers? What about integration with .Net and the xamarin forms ecosystem?

Drawbacks I see are: 1. no static typing. With typescript having taken off, and now even python and ruby becoming more and more feasible to use in production with static typing, switching to a new dynamic language is a hard sell for me. 2. limited ability to take full advantage of some of its unique features in many cases. The runtime and the included OTP library/paradigm has some really cool features with its approa…

> 1. no static typing. With typescript having taken off, and now even python and ruby becoming more and more feasible to use in production with static typing, switching to a new dynamic language is a hard sell for me.

While it's true that Elixir is a dynamic language, there's much less "magic" compared to Ruby or PHP, the language server has good autocompletion and warnings.

Re: 10 years-ish of Elixir

#86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> While other package ecosystems certainly have _more_ packages, the question is: how many of those will you actually use? Exactly. Saying NPM has millions of packages is completely misleading. There will be 20, 30, 40 packages that all do the same thing. Elixir is also a very stable language with no current plans for a 2.0 release. This means that while a lot of Hex packages may not have been updated in a while, the…

> Exactly. Saying NPM has millions of packages is completely misleading. There will be 20, 30, 40 packages that all do the same thing. And the one with the obvious name hasn't been updated in 18 months. Maybe it's complete. Maybe the developer has moved on. Then there are a couple half hearted forks. All of these dependencies bring in 1 to 100 dependencies each and you have to spend a days on the treadmill every mont…

And of course so many packages are just adding basic functionality to JavaScript that is available in most other languages' standard libraries.

Re: 10 years-ish of Elixir

#87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> While other package ecosystems certainly have _more_ packages, the question is: how many of those will you actually use? Exactly. Saying NPM has millions of packages is completely misleading. There will be 20, 30, 40 packages that all do the same thing. Elixir is also a very stable language with no current plans for a 2.0 release. This means that while a lot of Hex packages may not have been updated in a while, the…

> Exactly. Saying NPM has millions of packages is completely misleading. There will be 20, 30, 40 packages that all do the same thing. And the one with the obvious name hasn't been updated in 18 months. Maybe it's complete. Maybe the developer has moved on. Then there are a couple half hearted forks. All of these dependencies bring in 1 to 100 dependencies each and you have to spend a days on the treadmill every mont…

Is that a Node specific problem though? I have elixir packages up on Hex that I haven't maintained or looked at in years. In fact, I'm pretty sure they are buggy but since no one is using them I'm not worried about it.

Re: 10 years-ish of Elixir

#88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Exactly. Saying NPM has millions of packages is completely misleading. There will be 20, 30, 40 packages that all do the same thing. And the one with the obvious name hasn't been updated in 18 months. Maybe it's complete. Maybe the developer has moved on. Then there are a couple half hearted forks. All of these dependencies bring in 1 to 100 dependencies each and you have to spend a days on the treadmill every mont…

Is that a Node specific problem though? I have elixir packages up on Hex that I haven't maintained or looked at in years. In fact, I'm pretty sure they are buggy but since no one is using them I'm not worried about it.

There are packages on Hex that haven't been updated in a long time but still work perfectly (Canada, for example: https://github.com/jarednorman/canada). Elixir itself doesn't change much... in fact there's no plans for a 2.0 on the horizon, so the fact that packages don't change often isn't a big deal if they still do what they say they do and aren't hurting for more features.

Re: 10 years-ish of Elixir

#89
Great post, Elixir has come a long way but more importantly had a great foundation to build on out of the gate. One of the best maintainer communities I've seen for a language + framework in a while. Such a strong + clear open source vision set on building a flexible and robust platform/language. Ty Jose + Chris!!!

Very proud to have been using Phoenix + Elixir for our startup, https://www.distru.com, since day 1 and it was one of our best stack decisions. The language is so pleasent to code in, brings functional programming concepts, can do powerful things with GenServer, has great default performance, and enables us to tackle concurrency problems in a way rails just wasn't built for.

Not to mention the constant surprises from Elixir!! There's a built in scalable nosql database in the VM (https://elixirschool.com/en/lessons/specifics/mnesia/)!?!? And a key value store (https://elixirschool.com/en/lessons/specifics/ets/)?!? It's so fun to experiment with!

Can't wait to continue meeting great Elixir devs as we grow :). If any devs are interested in working on a cannabis startup built on Elixir since day one, I'd love to talk. blaine@distru.com

Re: 10 years-ish of Elixir

#90
post #82
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't say this to dismiss your experience, but just to share a counterexample: I found Elixir extremely easy to learn (despite having no Ruby experience, nor any significant experience in any functional languages). I went through the (excellent) official tutorial in a couple days, skimmed parts of Saša Juric's book, and felt reasonably confident diving in to actually writing code. Within a couple weeks I felt like…

I have found Elixir as a whole to be amazing, but the debugging process to be painful. Maybe its because I'm used to using Chrome's developer tools (since I mostly debug JavaScript), but I really wish that debugging on Elixir could be simpler. Using printf's is just too painful and feels backwards.

Debugging in IEx is actually quite nice (https://nts.strzibny.name/elixir-interactive-shell-iex/), but I agree that GUI-wise there is nothing I want to use.
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