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I'm a college student trying to get into software development. I was recently hired to build a dashboard around some data stuck in an archaic platform. I went

I'm a college student trying to get into software development. I was recently hired to build a dashboard around some data stuck in an archaic platform. I went with Phoenix and Elixir, and I really liked the combination of a focus on development enjoyment (inspired by Ruby on Rails) combined with an anti-magic attitude, so you can trace through what actually executes pretty easily. I haven't had much other experience though, so that that with a large grain of salt. My client was very happy with the speed of development and quality of the final product, so I consider it a successful choice by the main metric that matters here. Edit: The main pain point has been deployment. I spent an afternoon on some shell scripts that scp to a virtual server that mostly work fine, but I don't understand sysadmining very well and I I'm pretty sure they'll blow up on me at some point. It would be really nice if there was a tool that took care of the actual servers part for me.

itake 6y ago
My main issue with Elixir (and maybe this has changed in the last 3 years since I looked at it), is that there isn't a strong open source package libraries available like you see in Rails. People complained that you end up writing boiler plate code for things that in Node or Ruby would just be a package. I've heard great things about the language and framework though.
- iudqnolq 6y ago
  I haven't run into many issues where I wished there was a package, but I haven't programmed a web app in a language that had a lot of packages available. The main close call I had on this project was that there was only one package that supports generating excel spreadsheets, and it's a labor of love by one person. This wasn't a huge issue for me, I had a plan to write csv and then convert if it didn't work, as I didn't need formatting/fancy output. It turned out to work great, so that wasn't necessary. There was an excellent transactional email library that hooked into the standard templating system, and a few so-so approaches to authentication. I ended up rolling my own on top of a decent crypto library. For the non-web-speicfic bits I haven't found this to be an issue, Erlang has a whole kitchen sink with OTP (even if like a real kitchen sink it's a bit grungy if you look inside), and I've found plenty of algorithm/data structure-y packages.

itake 6y ago

My main issue with Elixir (and maybe this has changed in the last 3 years since I looked at it), is that there isn't a strong open source package libraries available like you see in Rails. People complained that you end up writing boiler plate code for things that in Node or Ruby would just be a package. I've heard great things about the language and framework though.

iudqnolq 6y ago
I haven't run into many issues where I wished there was a package, but I haven't programmed a web app in a language that had a lot of packages available. The main close call I had on this project was that there was only one package that supports generating excel spreadsheets, and it's a labor of love by one person. This wasn't a huge issue for me, I had a plan to write csv and then convert if it didn't work, as I didn't need formatting/fancy output. It turned out to work great, so that wasn't necessary. There was an excellent transactional email library that hooked into the standard templating system, and a few so-so approaches to authentication. I ended up rolling my own on top of a decent crypto library. For the non-web-speicfic bits I haven't found this to be an issue, Erlang has a whole kitchen sink with OTP (even if like a real kitchen sink it's a bit grungy if you look inside), and I've found plenty of algorithm/data structure-y packages.