from Hacker News

On to Elixir

by ahmaman on 8/16/23, 10:04 AM with 39 comments

• by mgdev on 8/16/23, 2:28 PM

  After 20 years trying All The Frameworks, Phoenix is the first that excites me in a long time. Both the community and the coding experience remind me of Rails's early days in 2004/2005.

  Same for Elixir in general. Different philosophies, but same energy, some craftsmanship, some welcoming attitudes, same hubris about what can/can't be done by revisiting from first principles.

  LiveView is quite elegant, and is something that could only exist with such elegance in a language/runtime/community that values and supports long-lived processes with functional semantics.

  Broadway builds on the shoulders of giants to provide robust data ingestion and processing... as a library, rather than the cobbled-together set of independent systems that is usually needed to do this.

  The architectural concepts underlying Livebook put it on a path to surpass Jupyter, if only we can get critical mass adoption.

  The stuff emerging in the Elixir + ML space thanks to Nx and Axon gives me some hope that Elixir will find a place as an all-in-one home for all things ML. Livebook makes it easy do to incremental experimentation. Bumblebee makes it stupidly simple to use pretrained models.

  It's all so magical.

  What we need, though, is better marketing!

• by sethherr on 8/16/23, 11:42 AM

  I agree with the code generation of libraries in Phoenix being a drawback.

  I think it maybe a reaction to there being too much magic in Rails dependencies, but it makes upgrades much harder.

• by sodapopcan on 8/16/23, 12:50 PM

  The point about code generation into the project is unfair. The only library I'm aware of that does this is phx_gen_auth, everything I've used works exactly as described. phx_gen_auth takes this approach due to José's experience working on Devise for Rails, which mirror's mine as a user. I overrode almost everything in Devise, often in very messy ways. While the difficult-to-upgrade argument is a sound one, once you've over-written a massive chunk of a library anyway, upgrading is no easier.

  Otherwise, great article about Phoenix!

• by aloukissas on 8/16/23, 11:46 AM

  I’m surprised to see that the OP, as a Django user, does not call out the lack of an out of the box admin tool that’s not there in Phoenix. Django’s admin is amazing and super useful in production. I love phoenix but I miss an admin tool :(

• by boxed on 8/16/23, 12:08 PM

  Last time I looked Ecto didn't have automatic migrations I think. Does it now? I can't imagine working without this feature after many years of Django...