3 ms·

Elixir is the solution to this with similar ergonomics.

syspec 6y ago
I've been experimenting with it, and it definitely has the feeling of working in rails / ruby. My only gripe is that the tooling is not as mature as rails. I use rubymine and the debugger has truly spoiled me. I tried to get the debugger going with a third party plugin for Intelli-j but it would crash when inspecting variables. Any tips?
- ollysb 6y ago
  I think most elixir dev's have a CLI based workflow where IEx.pry works very well.
- dfischer 6y ago
  There is not much I can comment on editor support as I’ve had the experience of both successfully and unsuccessfully using various debuggers in editors. If you jump into IEX and use the built in introspection it’s some of the most advanced tooling I’ve ever seen in any language. Especially when doing OTP-level topology.
user34234 6y ago
The company I work for (mostly standard Web Dev) uses almost exclusively Elixir for any backend work. Only the fanboys of Elixir and functional everything are happy with it, just to be different to everyone else. The experience is terrible: Tooling (editor plugins, tests runners, IDEs (oh, there are no IDEs...), debugging) is like going back 20 years. There are no libraries for the most basic stuff you get almost by default on the Ruby, Python, Node or Java ecosystems. So we end up reinventing half assed solutions to anything we need to do. Some days I think we would be sooo much better by just using Rails or Django. Of course, concurrency and the Erlang VM are awesome and the perfect fit for the web... if your problem is performance, it will solve that problem for you of course... other than that, is all wasted time in my opinion from my experience after years of using it.
- cpursley 6y ago
  Really? I've been able to find everything I need in the Elixir ecosystem from auth to background jobs and one of if not the best GraphQL server implementations out there. Do you mind sharing which libraries you found missing or incomplete?
  - user34234 6y ago
    Yes, in fact we have ourselves published a few open source packages out of the need we had to build them. The latest incarnation of this problem, was when we had to validate RUT codes (a tax code with a checksum we use here in Chile). Options for Python [1], options for Node [2], options for elixir [3] (don't mind to click, it's a list with nothing to do with RUTs or modulo11 validations). So we had to implement it ourselves. Looking for information we found example implementations [4], where as you can see you have example implementations even for Asterisk Dialplans (!!) but no mention of Elixir. [1] https://pypi.org/search/?q=rut https://pypi.org/search/?q=rut [2] https://www.npmjs.com/search?q=rut https://www.npmjs.com/search?q=rut [3] https://hex.pm/packages?search=rut&sort=recent_downloads https://hex.pm/packages?search=rut&sort=recent_downloads [4] https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anexo:Implementaciones_para_algoritmo_de_rut https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anexo:Implementaciones_para_al... There are many more examples. Of course you get libraries for the "standard" stuff, it is when you get into the detailes, and that happens when you are already too deep into your project, that you realise all the missing pieces. Also, what code editor do you use? we've tried everything, and seems the best option is you grow a beard and go emacs/vim. The VSCode plugins hog your laptop and are really inconsistent, incomplete and sluggish [1] [2]. [1] https://github.com/JakeBecker/elixir-ls/issues/54 https://github.com/JakeBecker/elixir-ls/issues/54 [2] https://github.com/elixir-lsp/elixir-ls/issues/96 https://github.com/elixir-lsp/elixir-ls/issues/96 Of course there is no IDE similar to intellij, rubymine or pycharm.
    - cpursley 6y ago
      Fair enough, thank you for sharing. I've had good luck with VSCode but I've never really been an IDE user (even with Ruby) so I can't comment much on that.

I've been experimenting with it, and it definitely has the feeling of working in rails / ruby. My only gripe is that the tooling is not as mature as rails. I use rubymine and the debugger has truly spoiled me. I tried to get the debugger going with a third party plugin for Intelli-j but it would crash when inspecting variables. Any tips?

ollysb 6y ago
I think most elixir dev's have a CLI based workflow where IEx.pry works very well.
dfischer 6y ago
There is not much I can comment on editor support as I’ve had the experience of both successfully and unsuccessfully using various debuggers in editors. If you jump into IEX and use the built in introspection it’s some of the most advanced tooling I’ve ever seen in any language. Especially when doing OTP-level topology.

user34234 6y ago

The company I work for (mostly standard Web Dev) uses almost exclusively Elixir for any backend work. Only the fanboys of Elixir and functional everything are happy with it, just to be different to everyone else. The experience is terrible: Tooling (editor plugins, tests runners, IDEs (oh, there are no IDEs...), debugging) is like going back 20 years. There are no libraries for the most basic stuff you get almost by default on the Ruby, Python, Node or Java ecosystems. So we end up reinventing half assed solutions to anything we need to do. Some days I think we would be sooo much better by just using Rails or Django. Of course, concurrency and the Erlang VM are awesome and the perfect fit for the web... if your problem is performance, it will solve that problem for you of course... other than that, is all wasted time in my opinion from my experience after years of using it.

cpursley 6y ago
Really? I've been able to find everything I need in the Elixir ecosystem from auth to background jobs and one of if not the best GraphQL server implementations out there. Do you mind sharing which libraries you found missing or incomplete?
- user34234 6y ago
  Yes, in fact we have ourselves published a few open source packages out of the need we had to build them. The latest incarnation of this problem, was when we had to validate RUT codes (a tax code with a checksum we use here in Chile). Options for Python [1], options for Node [2], options for elixir [3] (don't mind to click, it's a list with nothing to do with RUTs or modulo11 validations). So we had to implement it ourselves. Looking for information we found example implementations [4], where as you can see you have example implementations even for Asterisk Dialplans (!!) but no mention of Elixir. [1] https://pypi.org/search/?q=rut https://pypi.org/search/?q=rut [2] https://www.npmjs.com/search?q=rut https://www.npmjs.com/search?q=rut [3] https://hex.pm/packages?search=rut&sort=recent_downloads https://hex.pm/packages?search=rut&sort=recent_downloads [4] https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anexo:Implementaciones_para_algoritmo_de_rut https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anexo:Implementaciones_para_al... There are many more examples. Of course you get libraries for the "standard" stuff, it is when you get into the detailes, and that happens when you are already too deep into your project, that you realise all the missing pieces. Also, what code editor do you use? we've tried everything, and seems the best option is you grow a beard and go emacs/vim. The VSCode plugins hog your laptop and are really inconsistent, incomplete and sluggish [1] [2]. [1] https://github.com/JakeBecker/elixir-ls/issues/54 https://github.com/JakeBecker/elixir-ls/issues/54 [2] https://github.com/elixir-lsp/elixir-ls/issues/96 https://github.com/elixir-lsp/elixir-ls/issues/96 Of course there is no IDE similar to intellij, rubymine or pycharm.
  - cpursley 6y ago
    Fair enough, thank you for sharing. I've had good luck with VSCode but I've never really been an IDE user (even with Ruby) so I can't comment much on that.