by muhic on 7/4/19, 7:25 PM with 178 comments
by nickjj on 7/4/19, 8:36 PM
IMO it really does feel like you get the best of everything (developer productivity, developer happiness, great language for creating maintainable code, OTP and the BEAM bring a lot to the table, it's memory efficient, tracing code without a ton of experience is very doable, it's fast as balls and Phoenix channels / LiveView is a great abstraction on websockets). I find myself fist pumping all over the place as I make progress towards this app while learning as I go.
I don't think I've liked a technology this much ever and I'm honestly surprised it's not already more popular than it already is. I've been around for the release of a lot of major frameworks and technologies (Rails / Django, Node, Go, etc.). Nothing has impressed me this much. It truly feels like it's a zero compromise environment to write code in and I hope I can still be using it in 10+ years.
by anthony_doan on 7/4/19, 8:18 PM
I'm hoping to move to 1.9. The language just fit my ideology better, Jose Valim just stated that the language is mostly complete. All major planned features are completed unless something come up. The language isn't bloated, it's small and sweet, and it doesn't go out of the way to add random unnecessary features to the core.
I was fullstack since ~2008 and it is becoming pretty hard to be fullstack when frontend moves too dang fast for me. So the pace of Elixir and Phoenix is amazing. I know these two technology are relatively new but compare to its peers it's boring tech; as in it's battle proven and it's not going to radically change that often (at least not for the sake of hype or reinventing the wheel).
The community over at elixirforum is nice. There seems to be quite a few camps. The ones that stands out to me are the web dev and embedded camps.
by enraged_camel on 7/4/19, 8:18 PM
A couple of months ago we met with a prospective client to discuss their use cases and conduct requirements gathering. They really liked what we showed them, but the CFO wanted a dashboard that displayed the data in the app in a specific way. We shook hands, told them we would contact them soon, and parted ways. It was around 9 AM when we stepped outside the client's office and got back in our cars.
By 5 PM that evening, we had a stunning, fully functional dashboard built and deployed to the demo environment. It utilized a few new database tables that aggregated data, some data processing done by Elixir, passing that data to the Vue front-end and displaying it using Charts.js and a few other UI libraries.
I sent a quick email to the CFO with the URL. He responded ten minutes later with, "holy cow, why didn't you show this during our meeting if you had it already?!" :)
We are meeting with them again later this month, hopefully to sign them on as a client.
(For reference, I've used Rails and ASP.NET with C# before Elixir, along with JQuery back in the day, and then a bit of React. Can't speak about other frameworks and languages.)
by neya on 7/4/19, 11:51 PM
I'm an individual consultant with a very small team. Without Elixir, many projects that I've finished in weeks would have taken me months. This is a seriously under-rated language that would make you wonder why didn't you give it a shot earlier. It's that good.
My static site is now way faster than Jekyll or Middleman. I didn't re-write it for speed, speed was just a nice side-effect. I wrote it mostly for the language's flexibility.
With Ruby, which Middleman and Jekyll both use, you need to think in the traditional OOP way and sooner or later, you will hit the limits of the language itself. Whereas, with Elixir, everything is taken care of by guards. This is really one of the nicest codebases I've ever written in a while. This is in comparison to my earlier codebase which was written in Ruby, and I had to do all sorts of things like install a library to make the language more scalable. That was the ugliest hack I've ever done. [1]
Imagine, a Wordpress clone, only it runs on your computer and generates static files (this was my goal) but, written in less than a month by one person, working a full time job, with the same fit and finish of Wordpress.
Elixir is amazing.
by c4po on 7/4/19, 11:37 PM
Our dev team seem really happy with this tech stack.
Productivity is awesome - we are four months in and already have similar functionality to a (sort of) competitor that has spent several years on their dev. This is the first dev project I have experienced where we are ahead of our planned milestones. Got to find some more features to quickly add!
My original concern was getting hold of developers as Elixir lacks the pure numbers of people that other server environments enjoy, but this has not been an issue. If anything we have got more senior devs then we would otherwise be able to get as they are excited to be able to use Elixir. Oskar in Poland and Dan in London, hats off, you are awesome!
Not sure if I agree with others that the broader environment is underdeveloped - yes there may be less versions of the same thing compared to a large JavaScript framework, but what is there is absolute quality.
Only (small) gripe is that Elixir is not a fast language. At one stage I thought this was going to be a real issue, but great support from the community and improved understanding on how to do things the Elixir way (let it fail!) seems to have resolved this for us.
by thibaut_barrere on 7/4/19, 8:10 PM
- LiveView (which I use in production & have recommended for upcoming projects too) is a complete game changer, not because it allows to remove javascript, but because it removes a boundary (between the client & the server), making development & maintenance much faster since you only have one layer, and also making very rich features easier, because you can remain stateful during the processing (if you have interactive rich UIs with e.g. file upload & processing then live reporting as you process the file, this will remind you of desktop programming, in a good way)
- While the initial setup of apps can be a bit cumbersome to my taste (like the SwitchTower period of Rails - e.g. you'll need a build server or a Docker image typically), the mental model of programming is quite simple in a lot of cases afterwards. I would say that junior developers can be onboarded quite easily (I'm starting to train some), and maintenance is quite sweet at this point.
I can warmly encourage you to try Elixir out (a nice way to get started by the way is to code ExUnit tests to try out the language, see https://github.com/thbar/elixir-playground/blob/master/test/... as a boilerplate to get started).
by dkulchenko on 7/4/19, 7:57 PM
Elixir/Phoenix/Ecto are an absolute joy.
It took a bit to get used to immutability and FP but it feels so "cozy", for lack of a better word, to know exactly what my code is doing and to not be bit by obscured mutability and magic anymore.
by kuzee on 7/4/19, 9:28 PM
by SLIB53 on 7/4/19, 8:51 PM
by wmock on 7/4/19, 11:19 PM
by spraak on 7/4/19, 8:16 PM
by kureikain on 7/5/19, 6:43 AM
I literally learn it on the job.
Lack of typing is the biggest issue for me, but pattern matching enable to get the shape of object and to a certain extent and I'm quite sasitify with it.
by colinramsay on 7/4/19, 10:51 PM
by prodiguy89 on 7/5/19, 5:03 AM
No magic, no hacky patterns. No mess like the one you see with Node. For what it does the platform is hella stable. I drifted towards Go for a little bit but man, code in Go felt too verbose with weird patterns. Go is a solid platform as well. But it's not just my cup of tea for web apps right now.
Scalability is in reach if you need it. Hell, even if you need ridiculous background job processing power, use OTP already. And I forgot, liveView is also rock solid. Honestly, if anyone would ask me what the best platform for web apps right now is, I'd just say Phoenix/Elixir.
by philsnow on 7/4/19, 9:56 PM
by anm89 on 7/5/19, 12:39 AM
by SteveMorin on 7/4/19, 8:45 PM
by xutopia on 7/4/19, 7:49 PM
by SMFloris on 7/5/19, 4:35 AM
It's just the Phoenix framework for which the initial setup of the project generator feels so opinionated. You have no options, no way to make a template for the generator. Phoenix's LiveView is a great feature and I want to use it. It's just Phoenix itself that feels off for me, not as straightforward as it should be. Does anyone else get this feeling?
by benmmurphy on 7/4/19, 8:27 PM
the with syntax is nice and helps to deal with early exit on errors but still feels a bit awkward compared to imperative control flow.
like you can do something like this in an imperative language:
foo, err = func()
if err != nil {
return nil, Err("bad")
}
bah, err = func2(foo)
if err != nil {
return nil, Err("blah")
}
return bah
with {ok, foo} <- func() |> Error.or({:error, "bad"}),
{ok, bah} <- func2(foo) |> Error.or({:error, "blah"}), do
bah
end
for example what if i want to log something on the error path that includes some contextual information and custom formatting. probably, the easiest way is going to be to use with() and pipe to a custom function that triggers on the error path to do the logging because the code is going to start getting really messy. whereas if i was writing it imperatively i could just inline the logging statement most of the time because it is just a few lines of code.
foo, err = func()
if err != nil {
return nil, Err("bad")
}
bah, err = func2(foo)
if err != nil {
Logger.error("err: " + err + " when processing: " + foo.name)
return nil, Err("blah")
}
return bah
with {ok, foo} <- func() |> Error.or({:error, "bad"}),
{ok, bah} <- func2(foo) |> Error.or_else(fn err ->
Logger.error("err: " <> err <> " when processing: " <> foo.name)
{:error, "blah"}
end), do
bah
endby allanmacgregor on 7/5/19, 7:40 PM
With very little effort or development time we where able to put together a highly scalable solution that is robust and very low maintenance.
by aloukissas on 7/4/19, 9:35 PM
by etxm on 7/4/19, 8:09 PM
by Fishysoup on 7/4/19, 9:48 PM
by ggregoire on 7/5/19, 1:19 AM
by trevor-e on 7/5/19, 2:37 AM
I tried learning Elixir a while back and just couldn't get myself to like the syntax/ergonomics. It seems like most of the benefits people list for Elixir are actually attributed to BEAM, not the language itself.
by _pmf_ on 7/5/19, 5:53 AM
by navyad on 7/5/19, 9:01 AM