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To add another side to this coin, having recently used Phoenix to write an api after hearing good things, I found Elixir clunky, and Phoenix poorly documented.

by flashm 11y ago

To add another side to this coin, having recently used Phoenix to write an api after hearing good things, I found Elixir clunky, and Phoenix poorly documented. It tries to be too much like Rails (I realise this is the point, though), and is currently failing spectacularly in my opinion. YMMV obviously.

chrismccord 11y ago
In the spirit of making our docs better, what did you find poorly documented? We go to great lengths to have extensive, comprehensive docs. Pick any module in our source, and you'll find extensive documentation on usage, APIs, etc. All docs are extracted to hexdocs.com as well http://hexdocs.pm/phoenix/Phoenix.html http://hexdocs.pm/phoenix/Phoenix.html This is in addition to our separate online guides focused more on getting up and running through the basics. Where did we lose you?
- BuckRogers 11y ago
  This attitude has been shown by multiple people involved with Elixir/Phoenix from what I've seen. I'm impressed and though I'm not using Phoenix, I am very interested and that general attitude of "where did we lose you" has really raised the language/framework's status in my mind. I'm a Pythonista and feel more coerced/shunned by the leaders of that community, to the point where I feel like I'm somehow "part of the problem". I definitely see Phoenix/Elixir in a positive light and at some point will give it a fair shake for myself.
- flashm 11y ago
  Hi! It was a few things, but a while ago so can't remember all of them. An example was creating a migration. I had to rely on a blog post from about a year and a few versions of Phoenix ago to get the Cli commands just to add a column to a table. Appreciate now that it is probably in the ecto docs, but that's not really made clear anywhere and even then I didn't find them easy to navigate. Your docs in general are pretty good and comprehensive, I just felt like a few obvious things had been overlooked. Might just be me though...!
  - willyk 11y ago
    flashm - Thanks for taking the time to provide this feedback. Sorry if we lost you then, but hopefully we won't if there's a 'next time'. We've created an issue on the Phoenix Guides repo about this (https://github.com/phoenixframework/phoenix_guides/issues/462 https://github.com/phoenixframework/phoenix_guides/issues/46...), and as part of our work and the Guides we'll double check and make any revisions needed to help to make certain that we conver these topics clearly/thoroughly.
    - flashm 11y ago
      No worries - I have left a note on that issue explaining what I think might help! I will of course be giving phoenix another go asap.
- flashm 11y ago
  In fact, going back and looking at your docs again just now, I think it probably was just me. Maybe I was having a bad day...
- themgt 11y ago
  I think the Phoenix/Elixir docs in general are quite good, it's just the lack of years of blogs and stackoverflow q&a that makes it harder to jump in. Switching from Ruby's OO/functional to Elixir's purely functional/immutable/actor-based would be easier with more of other people's code to read and learn from. I'm a complete n00b and was just trying to get a pool of TCP client workers to monitor servers and update a DB and display the results in a Phoenix app, and I kept coming across the same 4-6 blog posts and docs, maybe 60% of which were for pre-1.0 Elixir and no longer quite worked. I see a huge amount of promise with Elixir/Phoenix as well; currently it makes some hard things easy but also many easy things hard. With a few years of library/community growth I could see it wiping the floor with Rails for a lot of projects.
  - jdalbert 11y ago
    An Elixir/Phoenix "Railscasts" would be great too
    - remi 11y ago
      http://elixirsips.com/ http://elixirsips.com/
- out_of_protocol 11y ago
  Chris, i want to have docs for phoenix + dependencies on a single page, globally searchable. Well, found it after some googling: http://i.imgur.com/qGh980D.png http://i.imgur.com/qGh980D.png (http://devdocs.io/ http://devdocs.io/) It was the real problem - hard to find where * method is located
bcardarella 11y ago
> it tries too much [to be] like Rails Only on the surface. Please see: https://dockyard.com/blog/2015/11/18/phoenix-is-not-rails https://dockyard.com/blog/2015/11/18/phoenix-is-not-rails
aczerepinski 11y ago
Any time I've gotten stuck in learning Phoenix, I've found the community to be generous in offering advice and solutions. The documentation is good, but if it fails (or you just don't know where to look), Slack/irc/Google groups are a great bet.

by flashm 11y ago

chrismccord 11y ago

In the spirit of making our docs better, what did you find poorly documented? We go to great lengths to have extensive, comprehensive docs. Pick any module in our source, and you'll find extensive documentation on usage, APIs, etc. All docs are extracted to hexdocs.com as well http://hexdocs.pm/phoenix/Phoenix.html http://hexdocs.pm/phoenix/Phoenix.html This is in addition to our separate online guides focused more on getting up and running through the basics. Where did we lose you?

BuckRogers 11y ago
This attitude has been shown by multiple people involved with Elixir/Phoenix from what I've seen. I'm impressed and though I'm not using Phoenix, I am very interested and that general attitude of "where did we lose you" has really raised the language/framework's status in my mind. I'm a Pythonista and feel more coerced/shunned by the leaders of that community, to the point where I feel like I'm somehow "part of the problem". I definitely see Phoenix/Elixir in a positive light and at some point will give it a fair shake for myself.
flashm 11y ago
Hi! It was a few things, but a while ago so can't remember all of them. An example was creating a migration. I had to rely on a blog post from about a year and a few versions of Phoenix ago to get the Cli commands just to add a column to a table. Appreciate now that it is probably in the ecto docs, but that's not really made clear anywhere and even then I didn't find them easy to navigate. Your docs in general are pretty good and comprehensive, I just felt like a few obvious things had been overlooked. Might just be me though...!
- willyk 11y ago
  flashm - Thanks for taking the time to provide this feedback. Sorry if we lost you then, but hopefully we won't if there's a 'next time'. We've created an issue on the Phoenix Guides repo about this (https://github.com/phoenixframework/phoenix_guides/issues/462 https://github.com/phoenixframework/phoenix_guides/issues/46...), and as part of our work and the Guides we'll double check and make any revisions needed to help to make certain that we conver these topics clearly/thoroughly.
  - flashm 11y ago
    No worries - I have left a note on that issue explaining what I think might help! I will of course be giving phoenix another go asap.
flashm 11y ago
In fact, going back and looking at your docs again just now, I think it probably was just me. Maybe I was having a bad day...
themgt 11y ago
I think the Phoenix/Elixir docs in general are quite good, it's just the lack of years of blogs and stackoverflow q&a that makes it harder to jump in. Switching from Ruby's OO/functional to Elixir's purely functional/immutable/actor-based would be easier with more of other people's code to read and learn from. I'm a complete n00b and was just trying to get a pool of TCP client workers to monitor servers and update a DB and display the results in a Phoenix app, and I kept coming across the same 4-6 blog posts and docs, maybe 60% of which were for pre-1.0 Elixir and no longer quite worked. I see a huge amount of promise with Elixir/Phoenix as well; currently it makes some hard things easy but also many easy things hard. With a few years of library/community growth I could see it wiping the floor with Rails for a lot of projects.
- jdalbert 11y ago
  An Elixir/Phoenix "Railscasts" would be great too
  - remi 11y ago
    http://elixirsips.com/ http://elixirsips.com/
out_of_protocol 11y ago
Chris, i want to have docs for phoenix + dependencies on a single page, globally searchable. Well, found it after some googling: http://i.imgur.com/qGh980D.png http://i.imgur.com/qGh980D.png (http://devdocs.io/ http://devdocs.io/) It was the real problem - hard to find where * method is located

bcardarella 11y ago

> it tries too much [to be] like Rails Only on the surface. Please see: https://dockyard.com/blog/2015/11/18/phoenix-is-not-rails https://dockyard.com/blog/2015/11/18/phoenix-is-not-rails

aczerepinski 11y ago

Any time I've gotten stuck in learning Phoenix, I've found the community to be generous in offering advice and solutions. The documentation is good, but if it fails (or you just don't know where to look), Slack/irc/Google groups are a great bet.