5 ms·

It sounds like you're recruiting from a pool of junior developers and convincing them to use Elixir instead of attracting folks who are already interested in th

It sounds like you're recruiting from a pool of junior developers and convincing them to use Elixir instead of attracting folks who are already interested in the language. Not only is that community sizable, but it's experienced- surveys of attendees at my conference (https://empex.co https://empex.co) consistently show that 50% have >5 years and 30% have >10 years in the industry. Elixirists really are senior developers and Elixir is usually their fourth or fifth language. If it's taking your hires years to get up to speed, then I would look at your hiring practices before blaming the community. As for libraries, I challenge anyone to name an unmet dependency in Elixir that is 1) trivial to implement and 2) not for some niche application. My company has built a scalable platform with 3 engineers. I don't even think about maintenance, I just think about delivering new features. So business wins are higher velocity + lower hosting costs + less downtime + senior team. You don't need to be WhatsApp to appreciate those benefits.

likortera 6y ago
The folks you're talking about are a lot more expensive (in Europe at least) than the equivalent folks for more traditional platforms. Again, and without centering ourselves in pure technical and our own careers and CVs. How does that help the business?. Regarding to libraries, there's not much to discuss. Just look at the number of available packages as right now: rubygems: 164,235 (source: https://rubygems.org/stats https://rubygems.org/stats) NPM: millions (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Npm_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Npm_(software)) PyPI: 283,519 (source: https://pypi.org/ https://pypi.org/) HEX:: 12 252 I'm pretty sure I can find more than one package I'll miss. > My company has built a scalable platform with 3 engineers. I don't even think about maintenance, I just think about delivering new features. So business wins are higher velocity + lower hosting costs + less downtime + senior team. You don't need to be WhatsApp to appreciate those benefits. Hosting costs are a lot cheaper for us than developer's time. Downtime has never been an issue given "cloud" (docker based) infrastructure. The productivity part is something we're not seeing to be any better than with more traditional technology, and the reason we're moving away. I wonder if what your team of 3 people is building couldn't have been built with just one engineer and ruby on rails at the expense of paying for two more servers.
- desmondmonster 6y ago
  Ironically, Europe has a higher concentration of Elixirists given Erlang was invented there. My hiring attitude is that paying for senior developers is cheaper in the long run given their ability to make better decisions. > I wonder if what your team of 3 people is building couldn't have been built with just one engineer and ruby on rails at the expense of paying for two more servers. Emphatically no. Having more servers costs more than just hosting, there's maintenance, orchestration, and communications complexity. While other package ecosystems certainly have _more_ packages, the question is: how many of those will you actually use?
  - sodapopcan 6y ago
    > While other package ecosystems certainly have _more_ packages, the question is: how many of those will you actually use? Exactly. Saying NPM has millions of packages is completely misleading. There will be 20, 30, 40 packages that all do the same thing. Elixir is also a very stable language with no current plans for a 2.0 release. This means that while a lot of Hex packages may not have been updated in a while, they are still rock solid. I agree that this is a very hard thing to get used to since the first thing I always do is looked at the last commit date and then the number of stars. While this is still useful, it doesn't hold the same weight it does in other ecosystems. Personally, I think this is how it should be. I won't say that the Elixir ecosystem is perfect, though. There has been trouble with maintainers leaving projects, but to knowledge someone always steps up.
    - gangstead 6y ago
      > Exactly. Saying NPM has millions of packages is completely misleading. There will be 20, 30, 40 packages that all do the same thing. And the one with the obvious name hasn't been updated in 18 months. Maybe it's complete. Maybe the developer has moved on. Then there are a couple half hearted forks. All of these dependencies bring in 1 to 100 dependencies each and you have to spend a days on the treadmill every month or two to keep things updated. I loved Node development despite the packaging mess but I really appreciate how the Elixir community tends to coalesce around key libraries/frameworks/methodologies and focus on making them the best possible.
nickjj 6y ago
> As for libraries, I challenge anyone to name an unmet dependency in Elixir that is 1) trivial to implement and 2) not for some niche application. For quite some time the ex_aws[0] package was no longer maintained because the only person who maintained it stopped using AWS. There were many months in between before a new maintainer was found. Unlike Python, Ruby, PHP, Node, Go, etc. there's no official AWS SDK for Elixir. The ecto pagination[1] package has a "low maintenance" warning, basically the author is no longer maintaining it except for fixing issues even though there's a number of interesting features that could be added that other web frameworks have available. The arc file upload[2] package was no longer maintained or touched for a really long time until someone took it over but now that new package is also racking up open issues and looks like it kind of stagnated in development. This isn't based on looking at last commit times too. I mean there's issues open to address important topics that haven't gotten reviewed for a long time. There's also no official Stripe SDK for Elixir and all of the community created ones feel kind of abandoned or no where near feature parity with Python, Ruby, Node, PHP, Golang or any of the other official packages offered by Stripe. This is the last thing I want to have to implement myself since it's so critically important. The same can be said for PayPal and Braintree integration. There's official SDKs for Python, Node, etc. but not Elixir. I've asked Stripe a couple of times about an Elixir client and they all say the demand is not near enough to consider creating one officially. These are only a few examples of tools I've found in questionable state when working with Elixir compared to Python and Ruby. All of which are very important in a ton of applications. Then there's also less generic but still really useful things like notification abstractions to send emails, texts or broadcast notifications to connected clients. Rails, Laravel and Django all have excellent solutions to this where you can get up and running in no time but with Phoenix you'll have to write all of this on your own. It's a huge undertaking. Long story short, I started with Phoenix and Elixir almost 2 years ago and today 2 years later I feel like if you plan to write any type of business'y app with Phoenix you're going to have to end up writing a ton of libraries yourself instead of focusing on your business problem. That might not be a problem if you have a huge team and your business idea is already proven and 5+ years old but for anyone who wants to build something and see if it works, it's hard to say you'll be able to build something faster than Rails, Laravel, Django or Flask if you already know one of those frameworks. Now you might say some of those packages are trivial to write but they're really not. That seems to be a common pattern I've seen with the Elixir community where someone will say just do it yourself because it's easy and then you're left hanging. Sure maybe it's easy if you're Jose or someone with 5+ years of prior Elixir experience and have written 100k+ lines of Elixir code but a regular developer who just wants to build web apps (not libraries) is going run into tons of roadblocks. I know I did. [0]: https://github.com/ex-aws/ex_aws https://github.com/ex-aws/ex_aws [1]: https://github.com/drewolson/scrivener_ecto https://github.com/drewolson/scrivener_ecto [2]: https://github.com/stavro/arc https://github.com/stavro/arc

likortera 6y ago

The folks you're talking about are a lot more expensive (in Europe at least) than the equivalent folks for more traditional platforms. Again, and without centering ourselves in pure technical and our own careers and CVs. How does that help the business?. Regarding to libraries, there's not much to discuss. Just look at the number of available packages as right now: rubygems: 164,235 (source: https://rubygems.org/stats https://rubygems.org/stats) NPM: millions (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Npm_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Npm_(software)) PyPI: 283,519 (source: https://pypi.org/ https://pypi.org/) HEX:: 12 252 I'm pretty sure I can find more than one package I'll miss. > My company has built a scalable platform with 3 engineers. I don't even think about maintenance, I just think about delivering new features. So business wins are higher velocity + lower hosting costs + less downtime + senior team. You don't need to be WhatsApp to appreciate those benefits. Hosting costs are a lot cheaper for us than developer's time. Downtime has never been an issue given "cloud" (docker based) infrastructure. The productivity part is something we're not seeing to be any better than with more traditional technology, and the reason we're moving away. I wonder if what your team of 3 people is building couldn't have been built with just one engineer and ruby on rails at the expense of paying for two more servers.

desmondmonster 6y ago
Ironically, Europe has a higher concentration of Elixirists given Erlang was invented there. My hiring attitude is that paying for senior developers is cheaper in the long run given their ability to make better decisions. > I wonder if what your team of 3 people is building couldn't have been built with just one engineer and ruby on rails at the expense of paying for two more servers. Emphatically no. Having more servers costs more than just hosting, there's maintenance, orchestration, and communications complexity. While other package ecosystems certainly have _more_ packages, the question is: how many of those will you actually use?
- sodapopcan 6y ago
  > While other package ecosystems certainly have _more_ packages, the question is: how many of those will you actually use? Exactly. Saying NPM has millions of packages is completely misleading. There will be 20, 30, 40 packages that all do the same thing. Elixir is also a very stable language with no current plans for a 2.0 release. This means that while a lot of Hex packages may not have been updated in a while, they are still rock solid. I agree that this is a very hard thing to get used to since the first thing I always do is looked at the last commit date and then the number of stars. While this is still useful, it doesn't hold the same weight it does in other ecosystems. Personally, I think this is how it should be. I won't say that the Elixir ecosystem is perfect, though. There has been trouble with maintainers leaving projects, but to knowledge someone always steps up.
  - gangstead 6y ago
    > Exactly. Saying NPM has millions of packages is completely misleading. There will be 20, 30, 40 packages that all do the same thing. And the one with the obvious name hasn't been updated in 18 months. Maybe it's complete. Maybe the developer has moved on. Then there are a couple half hearted forks. All of these dependencies bring in 1 to 100 dependencies each and you have to spend a days on the treadmill every month or two to keep things updated. I loved Node development despite the packaging mess but I really appreciate how the Elixir community tends to coalesce around key libraries/frameworks/methodologies and focus on making them the best possible.

nickjj 6y ago

> As for libraries, I challenge anyone to name an unmet dependency in Elixir that is 1) trivial to implement and 2) not for some niche application. For quite some time the ex_aws[0] package was no longer maintained because the only person who maintained it stopped using AWS. There were many months in between before a new maintainer was found. Unlike Python, Ruby, PHP, Node, Go, etc. there's no official AWS SDK for Elixir. The ecto pagination[1] package has a "low maintenance" warning, basically the author is no longer maintaining it except for fixing issues even though there's a number of interesting features that could be added that other web frameworks have available. The arc file upload[2] package was no longer maintained or touched for a really long time until someone took it over but now that new package is also racking up open issues and looks like it kind of stagnated in development. This isn't based on looking at last commit times too. I mean there's issues open to address important topics that haven't gotten reviewed for a long time. There's also no official Stripe SDK for Elixir and all of the community created ones feel kind of abandoned or no where near feature parity with Python, Ruby, Node, PHP, Golang or any of the other official packages offered by Stripe. This is the last thing I want to have to implement myself since it's so critically important. The same can be said for PayPal and Braintree integration. There's official SDKs for Python, Node, etc. but not Elixir. I've asked Stripe a couple of times about an Elixir client and they all say the demand is not near enough to consider creating one officially. These are only a few examples of tools I've found in questionable state when working with Elixir compared to Python and Ruby. All of which are very important in a ton of applications. Then there's also less generic but still really useful things like notification abstractions to send emails, texts or broadcast notifications to connected clients. Rails, Laravel and Django all have excellent solutions to this where you can get up and running in no time but with Phoenix you'll have to write all of this on your own. It's a huge undertaking. Long story short, I started with Phoenix and Elixir almost 2 years ago and today 2 years later I feel like if you plan to write any type of business'y app with Phoenix you're going to have to end up writing a ton of libraries yourself instead of focusing on your business problem. That might not be a problem if you have a huge team and your business idea is already proven and 5+ years old but for anyone who wants to build something and see if it works, it's hard to say you'll be able to build something faster than Rails, Laravel, Django or Flask if you already know one of those frameworks. Now you might say some of those packages are trivial to write but they're really not. That seems to be a common pattern I've seen with the Elixir community where someone will say just do it yourself because it's easy and then you're left hanging. Sure maybe it's easy if you're Jose or someone with 5+ years of prior Elixir experience and have written 100k+ lines of Elixir code but a regular developer who just wants to build web apps (not libraries) is going run into tons of roadblocks. I know I did. [0]: https://github.com/ex-aws/ex_aws https://github.com/ex-aws/ex_aws [1]: https://github.com/drewolson/scrivener_ecto https://github.com/drewolson/scrivener_ecto [2]: https://github.com/stavro/arc https://github.com/stavro/arc