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I am bummed out to see that this is the top comment. I don't doubt your experiences but I hope that other people do not latch on to this and use it as a strong

I am bummed out to see that this is the top comment. I don't doubt your experiences but I hope that other people do not latch on to this and use it as a strong argument against using Elixir. All of these complaints are skin deep and kinda petty, to be honest. > Tooling is just terrible. The VSCode plugin is crap, kills the CPU unless you disable features. There is no IDE from jetbrains. This is a bizarre criticism of Elxir the language. There are a lot of developers out there who prefer a more lightweight editor and do not want the bells, whistles and crutches of a heavy duty environment. I would never complain about a language just because an IDE does not exist for it. Tooling in Elixir is really some of the best I have ever used as far as the consistency had with mix, hex, hexdocs, etc... > Also, I've read some comments where people mention "we don't need redis", "we don't need workers" everything is so much easier. You can still use all the same battle tested tools with Elixir... but it is true that there are lots of situations where those things are genuinely not needed thanks to some of the things that come out of the box on BEAM.

ncallaway 5y ago
> This is a bizarre criticism of Elxir the language. There are a lot of developers out there who prefer a more lightweight editor and do not want the bells, whistles and crutches of a heavy duty environment. Right, but...there are also developers out there who do want those things. It feels very dismissive to dismiss a complaint like that as "petty" just because there's a set of people who don't have the same needs. I feel like it's a very useful piece of information about the language that doesn't feel at all petty to me. If you don't want the IDE-like tooling, then you can read the comment and think: "ah, they want more tooling than I do, so this critique doesn't apply to my use-case". If you do want that style tooling, then you might read the comment and think: "Ah, that's good to know. That applies to me, and I'll definitely take it into consideration". Someone having priorities that are different from you doesn't seem "petty" to me. It just seems...like different priorities.
- jimbob21 5y ago
  Exactly. One of the MOST valid criticisms of a language is the way (or lack of ways) in which it can be used.
cy_hauser 5y ago
> I would never complain about a language just because an IDE does not exist for it. I think their complaint is valid, especially in light of their finding it difficult to find experienced coders who are in their salary range. New coders can lean heavily on a good IDE to help: code completion, breakpoints, step wise debugging, one click links to the docs, easy code navigation, and more. Senior coders can and should use the editor of choice, but a great IDE makes a world of difference for a junior or even intermediate coder.
- throwaway81523 5y ago
  I haven't used elixir but used erlang for a while, with emacs. It did have a learning curve, but I don't think an IDE would have helped.
pavel_lishin 5y ago
Don't focus on tooling, focus on their complaints about not having enough senior engineers familiar with the language. We're in a similar boat. I don't know the full history of how we came to use Elixir, but I would wager that early on in the company, someone really loved it and evangelized it. But now, we don't have that many senior people who know it well. I can count the ones I talk to regularly on one hand, and once I run out of fingers, I'm probably sixth place runner up, which makes me very uncomfortable. That's why I wouldn't suggest Elixir. Unless you're incredibly sure you won't have significant churn for the lifetime of your business, or have money to burn specifically hiring Elixir folks, I wouldn't recommend it.
- whalesalad 5y ago
  This is not the fault of Elixir. It’s the fault of trigger happy CTO’s who chase shiny new objects without thinking about the long term, big picture. I’ve made plenty of unsexy decisions when my heart was pulling me in a different direction - because it’s the right thing to do based on the team you have or the direction you’re headed. Adopting Elixir, like Clojure or Haskell or any of the more esoteric languages is a commitment. Don’t do it if the benefits aren’t there or you aren’t willing to make the investment.
  - pavel_lishin 5y ago
    > This is not the fault of Elixir. That's very true. But it's still something to consider, especially for OP who's choosing a new language for a new project.
- AlchemistCamp 5y ago
  What do you think has been the difficulty for people at your company learning it? I encounter a lot of devs, especially experienced devs who pick it up very rapidly compared to what I've ever seen with JavaScript, ObjC, Rust or other most other languages I've spent time with.
  - pavel_lishin 5y ago

ncallaway 5y ago

> This is a bizarre criticism of Elxir the language. There are a lot of developers out there who prefer a more lightweight editor and do not want the bells, whistles and crutches of a heavy duty environment. Right, but...there are also developers out there who do want those things. It feels very dismissive to dismiss a complaint like that as "petty" just because there's a set of people who don't have the same needs. I feel like it's a very useful piece of information about the language that doesn't feel at all petty to me. If you don't want the IDE-like tooling, then you can read the comment and think: "ah, they want more tooling than I do, so this critique doesn't apply to my use-case". If you do want that style tooling, then you might read the comment and think: "Ah, that's good to know. That applies to me, and I'll definitely take it into consideration". Someone having priorities that are different from you doesn't seem "petty" to me. It just seems...like different priorities.

jimbob21 5y ago
Exactly. One of the MOST valid criticisms of a language is the way (or lack of ways) in which it can be used.

cy_hauser 5y ago

> I would never complain about a language just because an IDE does not exist for it. I think their complaint is valid, especially in light of their finding it difficult to find experienced coders who are in their salary range. New coders can lean heavily on a good IDE to help: code completion, breakpoints, step wise debugging, one click links to the docs, easy code navigation, and more. Senior coders can and should use the editor of choice, but a great IDE makes a world of difference for a junior or even intermediate coder.

throwaway81523 5y ago
I haven't used elixir but used erlang for a while, with emacs. It did have a learning curve, but I don't think an IDE would have helped.

pavel_lishin 5y ago

Don't focus on tooling, focus on their complaints about not having enough senior engineers familiar with the language. We're in a similar boat. I don't know the full history of how we came to use Elixir, but I would wager that early on in the company, someone really loved it and evangelized it. But now, we don't have that many senior people who know it well. I can count the ones I talk to regularly on one hand, and once I run out of fingers, I'm probably sixth place runner up, which makes me very uncomfortable. That's why I wouldn't suggest Elixir. Unless you're incredibly sure you won't have significant churn for the lifetime of your business, or have money to burn specifically hiring Elixir folks, I wouldn't recommend it.

whalesalad 5y ago
This is not the fault of Elixir. It’s the fault of trigger happy CTO’s who chase shiny new objects without thinking about the long term, big picture. I’ve made plenty of unsexy decisions when my heart was pulling me in a different direction - because it’s the right thing to do based on the team you have or the direction you’re headed. Adopting Elixir, like Clojure or Haskell or any of the more esoteric languages is a commitment. Don’t do it if the benefits aren’t there or you aren’t willing to make the investment.
- pavel_lishin 5y ago
  > This is not the fault of Elixir. That's very true. But it's still something to consider, especially for OP who's choosing a new language for a new project.
AlchemistCamp 5y ago
What do you think has been the difficulty for people at your company learning it? I encounter a lot of devs, especially experienced devs who pick it up very rapidly compared to what I've ever seen with JavaScript, ObjC, Rust or other most other languages I've spent time with.
- pavel_lishin 5y ago