7 ms·

I write CRUD apps for a living , how is Elixir gonna make it easier for me? It can't and it won't. Not saying it's bad or anything, just has nothing for me pers

I write CRUD apps for a living , how is Elixir gonna make it easier for me? It can't and it won't. Not saying it's bad or anything, just has nothing for me personally.

pdimitar 7y ago
If you elaborate on what you find underwhelming then perhaps people would not downvote you? They may even engage in a discussion.
- joelbluminator 7y ago
  Naah I'm good thanks though, why should I strive for lots of votes? like Elixir, voting on hackernews is meaningless
  - soneca 7y ago
    Sure, but I still would like to know why you don't like Elixir
- adamkittelson 7y ago
  A quote from pg's beating the averages (http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html) seems relevant here to me: As long as our hypothetical Blub programmer is looking down the power continuum, he knows he's looking down. Languages less powerful than Blub are obviously less powerful, because they're missing some feature he's used to. But when our hypothetical Blub programmer looks in the other direction, up the power continuum, he doesn't realize he's looking up. What he sees are merely weird languages. He probably considers them about equivalent in power to Blub, but with all this other hairy stuff thrown in as well. Blub is good enough for him, because he thinks in Blub.
cpursley 7y ago
Elixir (via Phoenix) not only makes CRUD apps trivial, it also sets you up to very easily evolve the application as requirements change.
- joelbluminator 7y ago
  PHP is trivial. Understanding it and shipping code can be done by a 9 year old. Rails is trivial. What is so trivial about Elixir? More concepts, caring way more about performance and concurrency (things a normal dev has to deal with very very rarely). Just don't see the upside
  - brightball 7y ago
    It's understandable. Elixir is one of those languages you won't really appreciate until you've experienced the problems that it addresses. You're getting down voted mostly because of your tone (IMO) but the appeal if Elixir is just a reality of experience. When I found it, I was 15 years in my career and when I dove in, learned it and saw how it addressed so many short term and long term issues that appear in application development...the balance was the closest thing I'd seen to perfect. But if I hadn't experienced the pain, I would never have appreciated it all the little details.
    - preommr 7y ago
      It would be nice if you elaborated on what those problems are and how elixir solves them better than existing alternatives. All I ever see is people exclaiming how awesome it is and then the responses turn out to be underwhelming for various reasons. Like hot reloading isn't that special or unique anymore.
      - gregors 7y ago
        I feel like this talk does a great job of answering that question - The Soul of Erlang and Elixir by Saša Jurić (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvBT4XBdoUE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvBT4XBdoUE)
        preommr 7y ago
        lol, there's the hot reloading. But that's an interesting talk. I didn't have time to go through the whole thing but the core of it seems to be the pros of erlang like BEAM's high concurrency advantages and uniformity of tools running on top of otp. It's an interesting argument.
generalk 7y ago
I also write CRUD apps for a living. Not every project needs Elixir, but here's several reasons why I might choose Phoenix for a project: 1. Phoenix's channels make communication between a frontend and backend pretty effortless. Create a channel, publish a message, and anyone listening to the channel picks it up. Communicating updates from the server to the client is simple. Communicating between clients is equally simple. 2. Elixir has great support for spawning and managing background processes. My go-to is Rails, and if I want to manage background work I have to use something like Sidekiq and Redis. It works, but Elixir is much nicer. I've written systems that need to manage heavy amounts of background work and I dream of rewriting them in Elixir. Just a few data points that might be helpful.
- ravenstine 7y ago
  I wish that more people would bring up points like this instead of just insisting that Elixir and Phoenix are "scalable". Both of those points sound appealing. It's like, okay, so there's the functional programming, the similarities to Ruby, the BEAM VM, the concurrency.... but what does it do for me? They're not exactly selling points on their own because other languages can compete with those things.
westoque 7y ago
It does for me. Let me give you an example: You make an app using Ruby on Rails, keep developing it, and it keeps growing. You monitor your traffic and it gets bigger, now you add more servers to handle the traffic (it costs you $20/server, now you need 4). A couple more developments, memory usage starts to grow also.. Now, you need to increase memory of your server.. but now you also need Websockets, so you add both and need to add more resources to handle the scale, and the cycle continues. When you use Elixir/Erlang and it’s BEAM VM, it’s highly efficient and scalable out of the box, so you won’t need to do “much” of the above. A simplistic explanation but shows the point.
- joelbluminator 7y ago
  OK I'm not working on Google scale, but for the vast majority of companies I don't think this actually matters that much. If it's all about budget than I would hire PHP devs instead of Elixir cos cheaper! No it doesn't make sense sorry. For the small amount of companies where this actually matters you'd still need to convince me how java/.net/Go can't get it right.
  - dnautics 7y ago
    ok maybe this make a difference. I can train a junior on elixir and have them writing code that I am confident won't break the system in prod within three months. I can't do that in any of the other languages, I would have to buy a senior.
    - joelbluminator 7y ago
      lol sure man, good luck with that project.
- jrochkind1 7y ago
  > it costs you $20/server, now you need 4 OK, so in real life maybe the costs can actually be an order of magnitude higher than this. But for $60/$80 a month? Is like no money. That is less than one hour of time for even a cheap developer including taxes and other overhead, or okay call it two hours a month of time if you want to be generous. So if Elixir instead of Rails (or, of course worse, _switching_ to Elixir from current Rails) takes more than, say, 24 hours of developer time in a year... you didn't save money.

I write CRUD apps for a living , how is Elixir gonna make it easier for me? It can't and it won't. Not saying it's bad or anything, just has nothing for me personally.

pdimitar 7y ago

If you elaborate on what you find underwhelming then perhaps people would not downvote you? They may even engage in a discussion.

joelbluminator 7y ago
Naah I'm good thanks though, why should I strive for lots of votes? like Elixir, voting on hackernews is meaningless
- soneca 7y ago
  Sure, but I still would like to know why you don't like Elixir
adamkittelson 7y ago
A quote from pg's beating the averages (http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html) seems relevant here to me: As long as our hypothetical Blub programmer is looking down the power continuum, he knows he's looking down. Languages less powerful than Blub are obviously less powerful, because they're missing some feature he's used to. But when our hypothetical Blub programmer looks in the other direction, up the power continuum, he doesn't realize he's looking up. What he sees are merely weird languages. He probably considers them about equivalent in power to Blub, but with all this other hairy stuff thrown in as well. Blub is good enough for him, because he thinks in Blub.

cpursley 7y ago

Elixir (via Phoenix) not only makes CRUD apps trivial, it also sets you up to very easily evolve the application as requirements change.

joelbluminator 7y ago
PHP is trivial. Understanding it and shipping code can be done by a 9 year old. Rails is trivial. What is so trivial about Elixir? More concepts, caring way more about performance and concurrency (things a normal dev has to deal with very very rarely). Just don't see the upside
- brightball 7y ago
  It's understandable. Elixir is one of those languages you won't really appreciate until you've experienced the problems that it addresses. You're getting down voted mostly because of your tone (IMO) but the appeal if Elixir is just a reality of experience. When I found it, I was 15 years in my career and when I dove in, learned it and saw how it addressed so many short term and long term issues that appear in application development...the balance was the closest thing I'd seen to perfect. But if I hadn't experienced the pain, I would never have appreciated it all the little details.
  - preommr 7y ago
    It would be nice if you elaborated on what those problems are and how elixir solves them better than existing alternatives. All I ever see is people exclaiming how awesome it is and then the responses turn out to be underwhelming for various reasons. Like hot reloading isn't that special or unique anymore.
    - gregors 7y ago
      I feel like this talk does a great job of answering that question - The Soul of Erlang and Elixir by Saša Jurić (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvBT4XBdoUE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvBT4XBdoUE)
      - preommr 7y ago
        lol, there's the hot reloading. But that's an interesting talk. I didn't have time to go through the whole thing but the core of it seems to be the pros of erlang like BEAM's high concurrency advantages and uniformity of tools running on top of otp. It's an interesting argument.

generalk 7y ago

I also write CRUD apps for a living. Not every project needs Elixir, but here's several reasons why I might choose Phoenix for a project: 1. Phoenix's channels make communication between a frontend and backend pretty effortless. Create a channel, publish a message, and anyone listening to the channel picks it up. Communicating updates from the server to the client is simple. Communicating between clients is equally simple. 2. Elixir has great support for spawning and managing background processes. My go-to is Rails, and if I want to manage background work I have to use something like Sidekiq and Redis. It works, but Elixir is much nicer. I've written systems that need to manage heavy amounts of background work and I dream of rewriting them in Elixir. Just a few data points that might be helpful.

ravenstine 7y ago
I wish that more people would bring up points like this instead of just insisting that Elixir and Phoenix are "scalable". Both of those points sound appealing. It's like, okay, so there's the functional programming, the similarities to Ruby, the BEAM VM, the concurrency.... but what does it do for me? They're not exactly selling points on their own because other languages can compete with those things.

westoque 7y ago

It does for me. Let me give you an example: You make an app using Ruby on Rails, keep developing it, and it keeps growing. You monitor your traffic and it gets bigger, now you add more servers to handle the traffic (it costs you $20/server, now you need 4). A couple more developments, memory usage starts to grow also.. Now, you need to increase memory of your server.. but now you also need Websockets, so you add both and need to add more resources to handle the scale, and the cycle continues. When you use Elixir/Erlang and it’s BEAM VM, it’s highly efficient and scalable out of the box, so you won’t need to do “much” of the above. A simplistic explanation but shows the point.

joelbluminator 7y ago
OK I'm not working on Google scale, but for the vast majority of companies I don't think this actually matters that much. If it's all about budget than I would hire PHP devs instead of Elixir cos cheaper! No it doesn't make sense sorry. For the small amount of companies where this actually matters you'd still need to convince me how java/.net/Go can't get it right.
- dnautics 7y ago
  ok maybe this make a difference. I can train a junior on elixir and have them writing code that I am confident won't break the system in prod within three months. I can't do that in any of the other languages, I would have to buy a senior.
  - joelbluminator 7y ago
    lol sure man, good luck with that project.
jrochkind1 7y ago
> it costs you $20/server, now you need 4 OK, so in real life maybe the costs can actually be an order of magnitude higher than this. But for $60/$80 a month? Is like no money. That is less than one hour of time for even a cheap developer including taxes and other overhead, or okay call it two hours a month of time if you want to be generous. So if Elixir instead of Rails (or, of course worse, _switching_ to Elixir from current Rails) takes more than, say, 24 hours of developer time in a year... you didn't save money.