5 ms·
My experience is that most Elixir devs are very excited about their language of choice, but also fair about the pros and cons. In fact, I've been surprised by t
by mercer 5y ago
My experience is that most Elixir devs are very excited about their language of choice, but also fair about the pros and cons. In fact, I've been surprised by this compared to the many other language ecosystems I've explored.
For example, while for many Elixir has been a 'step up' from Rails, most advice given, even deep in Elixir land, is that Rails might still be the preferable choice for a variety of reasons.
I imagine part of the reason is that most of 'us' don't use Elixir exclusively, so we can't just bail out of all other ecosystems and do the whole us vs them thing.
On the other hand, the above commenter seems to actively go out of their way to comment negatively about Elixir whenever it's mentioned on HN, and I still don't really understand why anyone would put in that kind of targeted effort.
- joelbluminator 5y agoIm not at all negative about Elixir. It could be a fantastic tool, I never used it. I do think that its past it peak, is very small and not a wise choice for a new business due to the very small ecosystem. I would say the same about Clojure or Lisp. As a Rubyist, I grudgingly admit it would have been wiser to start a business on Python or PHP than Ruby (though it matters much less than Elixir; Ruby is huge compared to Elixir). But all things being equal as a project owner you go with the ecosystem that has the brighter future. For Elixir it really doesn't look too good imo. It never gained traction like its contemporaries (Golang, Node, Rust, even Scala) and I have no reason to believe some sudden surge in popularity is about to happen. And soon Elixir won't even be new anymore; there will be shinier toys to play with. You will then see a massive exodus of the early Elixir adopters migrating to the new toys and writing blogs "Why we left Elixir for X". It's very painful when it happens, as a Rubyist I can attest. Anyway we can exchange data if you want or you can attack me personally because you don't like what I have to say...
- midrus 5y agoI used to work for a company that picked up elixir at its peak and after struggling a lot with hiring a few years later they deprecated it and started to replace it where possible with other technologies. So I totally understand and agree with what you said.
- joelbluminator 5y agoThanks! Was it only hiring though or were there other factors? When you dig in Elixir criticism there's quite a lot of issues. Missing / abandoned libraries comes to mind and I suspect its purely functional nature doesn't fit in the brains of many people. Elixir devs try to sell it as just a better Ruby/Rails which is outrageous in my eyes.
- midrus 5y agoYes, the ecosystem is a lot smaller. There are not as many well maintained libraries as in Ruby, or node. Just look and compare the numbers in the package managers websites. Also, the vscode editor plugin for elixir is atrocious. And finally, this is more of a personal preference, but I don't like compilation, makes development a lot slower. So ruby/python/raw node are better for me.