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And yet Phoenix hasn't stolen a significant amount of market share from Rails. > There are a number of web frameworks that perform much better than Rails If y

And yet Phoenix hasn't stolen a significant amount of market share from Rails. > There are a number of web frameworks that perform much better than Rails If you're measuring hardware loads and busting out your stopwatch to measure response times, then sure. Bottom line is, there are plenty of good reasons to choose Rails over Phoenix. If you want to label choosing a well-backed framework with an incredibly mature ecosystem "cargo culting" then by all means. Have fun writing Ecto queries by hand, wiring up document storage on your own, trying to find a standout auth library of choice like devise, finding a library that makes managing database views less of a pain, wiring up end-to-end system testing. I'll be over here running rails new, wiring up sidekiq to ActiveJob, and building shit with ease.

pdimitar 6y ago
> And yet Phoenix hasn't stolen a significant amount of market share from Rails. I thought we all learned popularity does not correlate with quality. It correlates pretty closely with corporate inertia and perceived lower risk of developer churn though. Businesses love tech stack for which there are bigger pools of programmers. Says nothing of the quality of the stacks. > If you're measuring hardware loads and busting out your stopwatch to measure response times, then sure. Needlessly snarky. Response times matter in a lot of businesses. Count yourself lucky that it hasn't been an important metric in your work. > Have fun writing Ecto queries by hand I do have fun writing those. Most times the code in my functions ends up more readable than the equivalent Rails code I wrote years ago. There are some exceptions where you have to dig deeper. Haven't seen a framework -- Rails included -- that lets you handle all complex cases with zero deeper digging needed. At one point you do have to understand SQL and query optimizations, no ways around it. > wiring up document storage on your own What for? > trying to find a standout auth library of choice like devise It's called Pow and works very well. Additionally, Elixir's maintainers themselves are authoring such a library at the moment. > finding a library that makes managing database views less of a pain We can argue if this is a good thing until the Sun explodes. It really depends on the business. I have consulted for businesses where it was very important and true enough, using a library that's well-tuned for classic web apps (like Ecto and ActiveRecord) isn't the best idea there. > wiring up end-to-end system testing For 3.5 years with Elixir this is the first time I hear that this is a problem. Any data to back this up? > I'll be over here running rails new, wiring up sidekiq to ActiveJob, and building shit with ease. More power to you. Rails is excellent for an MVP or a prototype and this is well-known. It's what comes after is what has burned me out of it. Its maintenance burden is much higher than many others, including PHP's Laravel.
- mindfulmore 6y ago
  > For 3.5 years with Elixir this is the first time I hear that this is a problem. Any data to back this up? My point is that it doesn't come with Phoenix out of the box (unless something has changed?), and that difference in philosophy is the core of what I'm getting at. With rails new I'm getting an end-to-end test suite and chrome driver installation for free. Phoenix also has no plans of implementing something similar to ActiveStorage do they? How about ActiveJob now that elixir developers have rediscovered how great a queueing system is with the adoption of Oban?. Will Phoenix ever make a move to include something like ActionText? They won't even consider adding basic things for developer productivity like undoing a generator. https://github.com/phoenixframework/phoenix/issues/2607 https://github.com/phoenixframework/phoenix/issues/2607 https://github.com/phoenixframework/phoenix/issues/1597 https://github.com/phoenixframework/phoenix/issues/1597 The Rails team is much quicker and happier to extract something out of the companies supporting it (Basecamp, GitHub, Shopify, etc) and include it directly in the framework, whereas the Phoenix team seems much less willing to take a "batteries" included approach. There's a balance of making something easy to use and making something "technically superior". The Rails team seems to care much more deeply about what the framework feels like to use, and the Phoenix team cares more about building something that is "dogmatically perfect" (which you're correlating with quality). What's easier for someone to learn? rails g model article title body user:references mix phx.gen.html Content Article articles title body I understand what they're going for here, but I'm not sure the tradeoff is worth it. If Phoenix wants to increase their adoption, then I think they need to accept that things like this matter.
  - pdimitar 6y ago
    > My point is that it doesn't come with Phoenix out of the box (unless something has changed?) You put a lot of weight on built-in features of frameworks in your reply. This is not an objective truth and even DHH himself admitted as much -- including in his article "Rails is Omakase" which I very much enjoyed (because he says that the Rails team picks what they deem the best ingredients and if you disagree then you are not the target audience). You find value in "officially vetted" libraries, I find value in being assemble to assemble my chair the way I want it to, with parts I built or bought myself. Neither practice is superior per se. Let's both admit that. > They won't even consider adding basic things for developer productivity like undoing a generator. Honest question: how many tech stacks even allow for that? Does Ruby have bytecode instrumentation on the level of, say, the JVM? (Java's instrumentation has unlocked it some quite impressive code generation and runtime code analysis abilities.) Generating boilerplate is pretty easy. But how many tools out there can scan your code and tell you "this looks like Devise's boilerplate with exceptions in files A and B on lines 123 to 150 and 201 to 217"? If Rails can do that I'd be very impressed. It couldn't, as far as I was aware, about 4 years ago. > There's a balance of making something easy to use and making something "technically superior". I never said this was important to me. I value Elixir's hassle-free parallelism and concurrency (which is more than what can be said about 99% of the tech out there where those things are always an afterthought). And Elixir is still pretty easy to use. I don't see why both things have to be presented as opponents? Seems like a false dichotomy. > The Rails team seems to care much more deeply about what the framework feels like to use You have spoken to the authors and they have told you this, in these exact words? > ...and the Phoenix team cares more about building something that is "dogmatically perfect" (which you're correlating with quality) And you have spoken with the Phoenix team. And they told you this. Exactly this? No. They don't do that. They don't want to steer developers in the direction they might deem the best (they said as much on ElixirForum). They give you freedom to choose. And the community has provided alternative approaches for a number of the classic building blocks of a web app. That's all there is to it and I am not sure how you managed to so grossly misrepesent it. :( I also never said anything about dogmatically perfect being important (much less correlated to quality!). You are projecting and we are talking past each other which doesn't help the discussion at all. If I cared about purity or similar concepts in the "dogmatically perfect" lane I'd go for Haskell or even Idris. Elixir -- and thus Phoenix -- are very far from "pure", "dogmatically perfect" or any such other academic ideals. Really not sure where you got that from? > What's easier for someone to learn? This is extremely subjective and varies from person to person. Are you claiming that Rails' way is factually superior to learn? To me both are quite straightforward and both require you to have learned some concepts beforehand. And both aren't exactly English with which you command the machine, no? > If Phoenix wants to increase their adoption, then I think they need to accept that things like this matter. Ever since I dropped off the mainstream tech train and started working on the sidelines I've noticed something extremely curious which is happening very consistently: the people who work with mainstream tech always assume that the smaller community wants more adoption. There have been a number of discussions on ElixirForum about this and various important figures of the maintainers' teams have openly said that they aren't aiming to make the language and its stack more popular; they want to make useful tech. One example is the recent Phoenix 1.5.0 release which now comes integrated with LiveView. A lot of people apparently don't want to deal with JS because at least 50% of the new posts on the forum since the announcement have asked exclusively about LiveView. So again, the maintainers aim to make useful tech, not to trend on Twitter, dev.to, StackOverflow, or anywhere else really. --- This became rather long. I apologise for that but still wanted to address several misconceptions that seem to have arisen in this discussion.

pdimitar 6y ago

> And yet Phoenix hasn't stolen a significant amount of market share from Rails. I thought we all learned popularity does not correlate with quality. It correlates pretty closely with corporate inertia and perceived lower risk of developer churn though. Businesses love tech stack for which there are bigger pools of programmers. Says nothing of the quality of the stacks. > If you're measuring hardware loads and busting out your stopwatch to measure response times, then sure. Needlessly snarky. Response times matter in a lot of businesses. Count yourself lucky that it hasn't been an important metric in your work. > Have fun writing Ecto queries by hand I do have fun writing those. Most times the code in my functions ends up more readable than the equivalent Rails code I wrote years ago. There are some exceptions where you have to dig deeper. Haven't seen a framework -- Rails included -- that lets you handle all complex cases with zero deeper digging needed. At one point you do have to understand SQL and query optimizations, no ways around it. > wiring up document storage on your own What for? > trying to find a standout auth library of choice like devise It's called Pow and works very well. Additionally, Elixir's maintainers themselves are authoring such a library at the moment. > finding a library that makes managing database views less of a pain We can argue if this is a good thing until the Sun explodes. It really depends on the business. I have consulted for businesses where it was very important and true enough, using a library that's well-tuned for classic web apps (like Ecto and ActiveRecord) isn't the best idea there. > wiring up end-to-end system testing For 3.5 years with Elixir this is the first time I hear that this is a problem. Any data to back this up? > I'll be over here running rails new, wiring up sidekiq to ActiveJob, and building shit with ease. More power to you. Rails is excellent for an MVP or a prototype and this is well-known. It's what comes after is what has burned me out of it. Its maintenance burden is much higher than many others, including PHP's Laravel.

mindfulmore 6y ago
> For 3.5 years with Elixir this is the first time I hear that this is a problem. Any data to back this up? My point is that it doesn't come with Phoenix out of the box (unless something has changed?), and that difference in philosophy is the core of what I'm getting at. With rails new I'm getting an end-to-end test suite and chrome driver installation for free. Phoenix also has no plans of implementing something similar to ActiveStorage do they? How about ActiveJob now that elixir developers have rediscovered how great a queueing system is with the adoption of Oban?. Will Phoenix ever make a move to include something like ActionText? They won't even consider adding basic things for developer productivity like undoing a generator. https://github.com/phoenixframework/phoenix/issues/2607 https://github.com/phoenixframework/phoenix/issues/2607 https://github.com/phoenixframework/phoenix/issues/1597 https://github.com/phoenixframework/phoenix/issues/1597 The Rails team is much quicker and happier to extract something out of the companies supporting it (Basecamp, GitHub, Shopify, etc) and include it directly in the framework, whereas the Phoenix team seems much less willing to take a "batteries" included approach. There's a balance of making something easy to use and making something "technically superior". The Rails team seems to care much more deeply about what the framework feels like to use, and the Phoenix team cares more about building something that is "dogmatically perfect" (which you're correlating with quality). What's easier for someone to learn? rails g model article title body user:references mix phx.gen.html Content Article articles title body I understand what they're going for here, but I'm not sure the tradeoff is worth it. If Phoenix wants to increase their adoption, then I think they need to accept that things like this matter.
- pdimitar 6y ago
  > My point is that it doesn't come with Phoenix out of the box (unless something has changed?) You put a lot of weight on built-in features of frameworks in your reply. This is not an objective truth and even DHH himself admitted as much -- including in his article "Rails is Omakase" which I very much enjoyed (because he says that the Rails team picks what they deem the best ingredients and if you disagree then you are not the target audience). You find value in "officially vetted" libraries, I find value in being assemble to assemble my chair the way I want it to, with parts I built or bought myself. Neither practice is superior per se. Let's both admit that. > They won't even consider adding basic things for developer productivity like undoing a generator. Honest question: how many tech stacks even allow for that? Does Ruby have bytecode instrumentation on the level of, say, the JVM? (Java's instrumentation has unlocked it some quite impressive code generation and runtime code analysis abilities.) Generating boilerplate is pretty easy. But how many tools out there can scan your code and tell you "this looks like Devise's boilerplate with exceptions in files A and B on lines 123 to 150 and 201 to 217"? If Rails can do that I'd be very impressed. It couldn't, as far as I was aware, about 4 years ago. > There's a balance of making something easy to use and making something "technically superior". I never said this was important to me. I value Elixir's hassle-free parallelism and concurrency (which is more than what can be said about 99% of the tech out there where those things are always an afterthought). And Elixir is still pretty easy to use. I don't see why both things have to be presented as opponents? Seems like a false dichotomy. > The Rails team seems to care much more deeply about what the framework feels like to use You have spoken to the authors and they have told you this, in these exact words? > ...and the Phoenix team cares more about building something that is "dogmatically perfect" (which you're correlating with quality) And you have spoken with the Phoenix team. And they told you this. Exactly this? No. They don't do that. They don't want to steer developers in the direction they might deem the best (they said as much on ElixirForum). They give you freedom to choose. And the community has provided alternative approaches for a number of the classic building blocks of a web app. That's all there is to it and I am not sure how you managed to so grossly misrepesent it. :( I also never said anything about dogmatically perfect being important (much less correlated to quality!). You are projecting and we are talking past each other which doesn't help the discussion at all. If I cared about purity or similar concepts in the "dogmatically perfect" lane I'd go for Haskell or even Idris. Elixir -- and thus Phoenix -- are very far from "pure", "dogmatically perfect" or any such other academic ideals. Really not sure where you got that from? > What's easier for someone to learn? This is extremely subjective and varies from person to person. Are you claiming that Rails' way is factually superior to learn? To me both are quite straightforward and both require you to have learned some concepts beforehand. And both aren't exactly English with which you command the machine, no? > If Phoenix wants to increase their adoption, then I think they need to accept that things like this matter. Ever since I dropped off the mainstream tech train and started working on the sidelines I've noticed something extremely curious which is happening very consistently: the people who work with mainstream tech always assume that the smaller community wants more adoption. There have been a number of discussions on ElixirForum about this and various important figures of the maintainers' teams have openly said that they aren't aiming to make the language and its stack more popular; they want to make useful tech. One example is the recent Phoenix 1.5.0 release which now comes integrated with LiveView. A lot of people apparently don't want to deal with JS because at least 50% of the new posts on the forum since the announcement have asked exclusively about LiveView. So again, the maintainers aim to make useful tech, not to trend on Twitter, dev.to, StackOverflow, or anywhere else really. --- This became rather long. I apologise for that but still wanted to address several misconceptions that seem to have arisen in this discussion.