from Hacker News

An Elixir adoption success story

by lucis on 6/29/21, 10:10 PM with 200 comments

  • by eric4smith on 6/30/21, 12:39 AM

    We use elixir 24/7 on all projects. All the new programmers that ever worked with us never knew Elixir in the first place.

    And all of them picked it up in a couple of weeks to a level where they could start making changes to code.

    I think we are overestimating the amount of time it takes to learn a new language.

    The hardest thing to grok with FP is immutable data.

    Once you get past that, you're rolling.

    But the speed and concurrency is no laughing matter. Miles and miles and miles ahead of ruby, python, etc in that matter.

    Task.start(...)

    Spin off a background process from a web request where you don't care to get back something.

    Basically eliminate Redis or caching.

    Just need Postgresql/Mysql.

    If you're wild eyed you can use Mnesia without the databases.

    Run jobs across a cluster sanely with a good job library that only needs Postgresql.

    The story goes on and on. Unless you have tons and tons invested into what you're doing right now, it makes a lot of sense to start to spin up things on the edge of your monolith or SOA with Elixir.

    New projects should be started with Elixir.

    The idea that it's "hard to find programmers" -- does not really stand up. Because anyone who can't grok a new programming language in a short time, is not really a good programmer.

  • by codeptualize on 6/30/21, 6:26 AM

    I find it strange how always the "mainstream" and "not popular enough " arguments comes up in any Elixir related post.

    Does tech have to be "mainstream" to use it? I would say it doesn't.

    Take Erlang, or OCaml, or F#, I wouldn't call those mainstream but they are great languages that solve real problems, and people using them seems generally very positive about them.

    All you need is enough popularity and enough companies using and backing it for it to be maintained. I think Elixir has this.

    Can't speak to the hiring situation but I wonder how problematic it can be given all the stories of how easy it is to onboard people and plenty of posts and comments of devs wanting to do Elixir. Even if, it depends on your situation, you don't always need a big workforce to do big things, see Whatsapp for example.

  • by arcturus17 on 6/29/21, 11:33 PM

    I run a growing agency and we run primarily on React + Django, but I really want to give Elixir a shot at some point.

    I find its concurrency features, purported developer productivity, and it’s positioning as a “niche but popular” tech (these can be nice to acquire technical clients) very appealing.

    Does anyone have any experience running an Elixir consultancy / agency / software house? Or freelancing? How is the market and your general experience?

  • by ozmaverick72 on 6/30/21, 12:17 AM

    All these stories can be distilled into - "I picked something I liked and we made it work. Yay team"

  • by rishav_sharan on 6/30/21, 3:48 AM

    Lots of posts here are talking about Elixir's concurrency and performance, but in benchmarks like techempower, Elixir comes fairly low.

    Can someone help me rationalize this discrepancy?

    Also, in general, for a Digital Ocean droplet, how many requests per second (db query based) can Elixir handle while maintaining a sub 200ms latency?

  • by masijo on 6/29/21, 10:55 PM

    I really wish there were more remote Elixir job offers. Seems like such a great productive language to use, and Phoenix with LiveView is just great.

  • by babelfish on 6/30/21, 12:13 AM

    > The need for concurrency and fault-tolerance made Elixir an obvious choice for this application, but that alone wasn't enough to seal the deal.

    What? Why does this make Elixir an obvious choice? Most (if not all) major languages offer concurrency primitives (e.g. goroutines), and fault-tolerance is included as a requirement by default for any sufficiently complex distributed system, but has little to do with the languages/frameworks used to build that system. Not seeing why these requirements make Elixir a better choice than any other language

  • by krishvs on 6/30/21, 3:21 AM

    Looking for some advice.

    We have written several microservices primarily for websockets in Elixir. They are great with literal zero maintenance costs..but how do Elixir developers handle the following when going all in:

    1. Long running workflows - there do not seem to be popular frameworks like camunda, jbpm, temporal or cadence for elixir

    2. Integration libraries - similar to apache camel

    3. Inbuilt scripting engines to run user scripts like nashorn, graaljs or groovy

    We really enjoy working with rails and would like to go all in into elixir. But the ecosystem of available frameworks seems to always come in the way and makes us choose spring boot or rails.

  • by ciconia on 6/30/21, 8:23 AM

    Off topic: Am I the only one who finds the stock photos in the article off-putting? They have nothing to do with the subject matter, except in a very indirect, sort-of-metaphorical way. I would take the article much more seriously if they weren't there.

  • by aswinmohanme on 6/30/21, 8:51 AM

    The best things about Elixir is it's pattern matching and it's inbuilt documentation tool. Each and every document for every package is consistent, which are exploited by the IDE tools for stellar in editor help.

  • by leke on 6/30/21, 5:04 AM

    > We had two viable choices for the new application that needed to be built---Rails and Phoenix. The team to which we were delivering the project had no Elixir experience at all, so a choice to build a Phoenix app represented a choice to adopt Elixir.

    *Laravel and all the other PHP frameworks waving their hands frantically...

    Hello, Hello!

  • by mouldysammich on 6/30/21, 7:16 AM

    I wish there were more roles for elixir newbies/general newbies out there. I've been learning some elixir basics and it seems like itd be a tonne of fun to work with.

  • by jatins on 6/30/21, 7:22 AM

    Folks who have used Elixir in a team environment (as opposed to for personal use), is the lack of types an issue in navigating big/unfamiliar codebases?

  • by xupybd on 6/30/21, 1:05 AM

    Wow that is insane to do that much in 3 months.

    I'm not sure how big the team was but I'm impressed.

  • by colesantiago on 6/30/21, 1:17 AM

    Just curious, seems to see a lot of Elixir posts crop up on HN lately.

    I know a startup that did £75K+ in sales in the first week with only just using node + heroku.

    Could the same be applied to Elixir if it is really that good?

    Are there any pitfalls that one should know about?

  • by cutler on 6/30/21, 3:07 AM

    https://uk.indeed.com

      title:elixir / UK = 11 jobs
    The trouble with Elixir is that it's never going to be mainstream.