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> When I say perfect, I mean, there has been never once in my career where I hit a roadblock due to the language's limitation or complexity or flawed assumption

by nickjj 7y ago

> When I say perfect, I mean, there has been never once in my career where I hit a roadblock due to the language's limitation or complexity or flawed assumption. I faced this with other languages, but not Elixir. That is interesting. I've gone from Geocities pages to ASP Classic, PHP, WP, Rails, Flask and have been dabbling with Elixir and Phoenix for a bit. So far LiveView (and some bits of Elixir in general) has been the only time in my career where I felt like I'm seriously struggling hard to understand how things come together and how to solve real but fairly common web dev problems without asking for help (mainly with LV). I've had to ask for help on IRC / the forums an embarrassing amount of times. Where as with Rails and Flask almost everything except the most crazy problems were solvable with a little bit of Googling and self exploration. Now, I'm not saying Elixir and Phoenix is bad at all. I'm still happily using it to build my next big project (for all of the reasons that everyone else uses it for), and the Programming Phoenix book is a great learning resource for building regular web apps with Phoenix, but there's nothing like that for LiveView. But on the bright side, Chris (the author of Phoenix) and Jose (the author of Elixir) are remarkably responsive to help the community. Lots of other folks are super helpful too. That and once things start to click, you can write some really pleasant looking code and actually understand what it does a few months later.

freehunter 7y ago
I agree. I’ve tried learning a ton of times but I always hit something I don’t understand and struggle to find help except asking. I think because it’s such a niche language still. With Rails there aren’t a lot of questions left to ask. They’ve already been asked and answered. That’s not the case with Elixir and especially Phoenix.
anthony_doan 7y ago
It sounds like you're mostly backend and struggle with the blending of backend/frontend with liveview?
- nickjj 7y ago
  I haven't had extensive front-end experience writing React code but I've been around the block with JS. I'm pretty familiar with the event model of "hey guys, I want to do something on click, so let me wire up this handler which executes X when Y happens". The struggle is mainly around the nuisances of how certain things work with LV and what the implications are of using X vs Y with practical examples. I wrote a forum post asking for help about this the other day at https://elixirforum.com/t/concrete-examples-of-when-to-use-live-patch-live-redirect-push-redirect-push-patch/30751 https://elixirforum.com/t/concrete-examples-of-when-to-use-l.... Then there's other things like wanting to do authentication. I know in theory you'll need to create a controller action to create / delete the session and there's phx-trigger-action to submit a LV form to a controller but there's no code examples anywhere on how to pull this off and get a "current_user" like you normally would with a non-LV set up. But authentication is one of the most important things in any app.
dnautics 7y ago
LiveView is much much easier to understand if you have a solid understanding of how Elixir works in a non-webdev setting, because Phoenix hides a lot of the process architecture that it's leveraging to serve pages, and it's front-and center in LiveView. And also, it's easy to find help for Flask and Rails by googling because... It's been around longer. LiveView has been GA for less than a year, and even some major shifts have come around (like mount/2 suddenly becoming mount/3 in one of the last releases).
- nickjj 7y ago
  Yeah, that's one of the main problems, almost every blog post is out of date because live components are new and there's introductions to many other new things as well. But then I look at the Live View equiv. in other frameworks. All of which came well after Live View since they are modeled after it. For example: https://laravel-livewire.com/docs/quickstart https://laravel-livewire.com/docs/quickstart in Laravel. I'm not a Laravel developer but their documentation is next level amazing and the author of the library even has a screencast series going that is fully up to date where he builds a real app using Live Wire to demo how it works in practice. I don't even know Laravel at all, but I can skim their docs and get a feel for how to solve real problems like validation, authorization, pagination, and everything else is focused on practical examples and explaining things very well in the process. But with Live View, the docs are not anything like this. It reads more like a low level guide on the API itself, not how things work in practice and when you should use certain things or how to write common web dev features. After reading the docs, you're left wondering "ok, but how do I get started using Live View in practice?", IMO at least. There's also the Rails equiv. which is https://expo.stimulusreflex.com/ https://expo.stimulusreflex.com/. Besides the docs there's a bunch of real practical examples, with a live demo of how they all work without having to install anything. With Live View, we have an example repo but it's very out dated at the moment to the point where you can't even follow it with the docs and it seems to not be based on best practices anymore since new things were released with LV.

by nickjj 7y ago

freehunter 7y ago

I agree. I’ve tried learning a ton of times but I always hit something I don’t understand and struggle to find help except asking. I think because it’s such a niche language still. With Rails there aren’t a lot of questions left to ask. They’ve already been asked and answered. That’s not the case with Elixir and especially Phoenix.

anthony_doan 7y ago

It sounds like you're mostly backend and struggle with the blending of backend/frontend with liveview?

nickjj 7y ago
I haven't had extensive front-end experience writing React code but I've been around the block with JS. I'm pretty familiar with the event model of "hey guys, I want to do something on click, so let me wire up this handler which executes X when Y happens". The struggle is mainly around the nuisances of how certain things work with LV and what the implications are of using X vs Y with practical examples. I wrote a forum post asking for help about this the other day at https://elixirforum.com/t/concrete-examples-of-when-to-use-live-patch-live-redirect-push-redirect-push-patch/30751 https://elixirforum.com/t/concrete-examples-of-when-to-use-l.... Then there's other things like wanting to do authentication. I know in theory you'll need to create a controller action to create / delete the session and there's phx-trigger-action to submit a LV form to a controller but there's no code examples anywhere on how to pull this off and get a "current_user" like you normally would with a non-LV set up. But authentication is one of the most important things in any app.

dnautics 7y ago

LiveView is much much easier to understand if you have a solid understanding of how Elixir works in a non-webdev setting, because Phoenix hides a lot of the process architecture that it's leveraging to serve pages, and it's front-and center in LiveView. And also, it's easy to find help for Flask and Rails by googling because... It's been around longer. LiveView has been GA for less than a year, and even some major shifts have come around (like mount/2 suddenly becoming mount/3 in one of the last releases).

nickjj 7y ago
Yeah, that's one of the main problems, almost every blog post is out of date because live components are new and there's introductions to many other new things as well. But then I look at the Live View equiv. in other frameworks. All of which came well after Live View since they are modeled after it. For example: https://laravel-livewire.com/docs/quickstart https://laravel-livewire.com/docs/quickstart in Laravel. I'm not a Laravel developer but their documentation is next level amazing and the author of the library even has a screencast series going that is fully up to date where he builds a real app using Live Wire to demo how it works in practice. I don't even know Laravel at all, but I can skim their docs and get a feel for how to solve real problems like validation, authorization, pagination, and everything else is focused on practical examples and explaining things very well in the process. But with Live View, the docs are not anything like this. It reads more like a low level guide on the API itself, not how things work in practice and when you should use certain things or how to write common web dev features. After reading the docs, you're left wondering "ok, but how do I get started using Live View in practice?", IMO at least. There's also the Rails equiv. which is https://expo.stimulusreflex.com/ https://expo.stimulusreflex.com/. Besides the docs there's a bunch of real practical examples, with a live demo of how they all work without having to install anything. With Live View, we have an example repo but it's very out dated at the moment to the point where you can't even follow it with the docs and it seems to not be based on best practices anymore since new things were released with LV.