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I honestly don't understand why Ruby developers are all so excited about Elixir/Phoenix. Don't hear me wrong, I think Elixir is an amazing language and I love

by dudul 11y ago

I honestly don't understand why Ruby developers are all so excited about Elixir/Phoenix. Don't hear me wrong, I think Elixir is an amazing language and I love using it, but it has nothing to do with Ruby, the paradigm is completely different. It makes me think that the only reason Ruby devs are so into it is just because the syntax is similar, which make them seem a little... shallow I guess.

adambrod 11y ago
I'm not a rubyist but it could be that their jaded with the current state of Ruby and constant performance struggles with Rails. Elixir has a similar community that's focused on testing, tooling, and quality. However I agree, very little Ruby syntax, just def & end for the most part.
bratsche 11y ago
I think Erlang just wasn't really on my radar before. I didn't know much about it and kind of just associated it with phone systems and didn't consider it for web. Elixir just came up on my radar and I started seeing a lot of smart people looking at it and Erlang, and so I did too. Now I kind of don't want to go back to Ruby. Part of it is that I like Elixir's syntax better than Ruby's, but mostly it's everything else. Ruby isn't very good at concurrency, so people making Rails apps have to move things to other services (sometimes in totally different languages) in order to get around this. As I've learned more about OTP I find that I can spin up different 'services' in the form of GenServers that are running inside the same VM, use supervisors to handle the inevitable crashes that will occur, and because the entire system is in the same language/VM it's a little easier to test. So far it all just feels less like some Frankenstein that's getting stitched together. :) Phoenix is nice too, but a lot of its niceness and power really comes from things lower than it in the stack: OTP, BEAM, Cowboy, Ecto, and mix. I really like Ecto so far, it feels more natural to me than ActiveRecord once I've gotten the hang of it, although it still has places where it is obvious that it's not quite as mature. One thing that Phoenix provides which is really nice (although I haven't made much use of yet) are the channels.
innocentoldguy 11y ago
I work with Ruby all the time, but the skin-deep similarity in syntax isn't at all why I like Elixir. I'm excited about Elixir because, like Ruby, it makes programming fun; even though the two languages are fundamentally different.
pbowyer 11y ago
> I honestly don't understand why Ruby developers are all so excited about Elixir/Phoenix. Perhaps the history of Ruby uptake explains it? My feeling is many of these 'Ruby' developers started as Rails developers. Rails did cool stuff, but it had they fanboy/hype around it that only Apple usually garner. I wonder if now Ruby is established, has lost its excitement, and problems are encountered by users day-to-day, Elixir looks like the next magic bullet? I.e. they are predisposed to being attracted to the noise [and NodeJS didn't attract them all because of...??] I've nothing against Ruby or Rails, but I did not appreciate the single-minded hype and excitement around one piece of technology which wasn't flawless.
- dudul 11y ago
  I can relate to that yes. What kept me away from RoR is this strange community that seemed to stubbornly refused to look into anything else, believing that their technology was the silver bullet. Maybe I was wrong, but that's the feeling I got. I have to say, the performance issues in Ruby always were a bit problem to me. I would hate to see the same thing happen with Elixir which, I believe, can become an amazing technology and finally help give Erlang the recognition it deserves.

by dudul 11y ago

adambrod 11y ago

I'm not a rubyist but it could be that their jaded with the current state of Ruby and constant performance struggles with Rails. Elixir has a similar community that's focused on testing, tooling, and quality. However I agree, very little Ruby syntax, just def & end for the most part.

bratsche 11y ago

I think Erlang just wasn't really on my radar before. I didn't know much about it and kind of just associated it with phone systems and didn't consider it for web. Elixir just came up on my radar and I started seeing a lot of smart people looking at it and Erlang, and so I did too. Now I kind of don't want to go back to Ruby. Part of it is that I like Elixir's syntax better than Ruby's, but mostly it's everything else. Ruby isn't very good at concurrency, so people making Rails apps have to move things to other services (sometimes in totally different languages) in order to get around this. As I've learned more about OTP I find that I can spin up different 'services' in the form of GenServers that are running inside the same VM, use supervisors to handle the inevitable crashes that will occur, and because the entire system is in the same language/VM it's a little easier to test. So far it all just feels less like some Frankenstein that's getting stitched together. :) Phoenix is nice too, but a lot of its niceness and power really comes from things lower than it in the stack: OTP, BEAM, Cowboy, Ecto, and mix. I really like Ecto so far, it feels more natural to me than ActiveRecord once I've gotten the hang of it, although it still has places where it is obvious that it's not quite as mature. One thing that Phoenix provides which is really nice (although I haven't made much use of yet) are the channels.

innocentoldguy 11y ago

I work with Ruby all the time, but the skin-deep similarity in syntax isn't at all why I like Elixir. I'm excited about Elixir because, like Ruby, it makes programming fun; even though the two languages are fundamentally different.

pbowyer 11y ago

> I honestly don't understand why Ruby developers are all so excited about Elixir/Phoenix. Perhaps the history of Ruby uptake explains it? My feeling is many of these 'Ruby' developers started as Rails developers. Rails did cool stuff, but it had they fanboy/hype around it that only Apple usually garner. I wonder if now Ruby is established, has lost its excitement, and problems are encountered by users day-to-day, Elixir looks like the next magic bullet? I.e. they are predisposed to being attracted to the noise [and NodeJS didn't attract them all because of...??] I've nothing against Ruby or Rails, but I did not appreciate the single-minded hype and excitement around one piece of technology which wasn't flawless.

dudul 11y ago
I can relate to that yes. What kept me away from RoR is this strange community that seemed to stubbornly refused to look into anything else, believing that their technology was the silver bullet. Maybe I was wrong, but that's the feeling I got. I have to say, the performance issues in Ruby always were a bit problem to me. I would hate to see the same thing happen with Elixir which, I believe, can become an amazing technology and finally help give Erlang the recognition it deserves.