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My biggest gripe with Rails is the magic it has. It's amazing for small projects but once you reach a certain size for the codebase, things go haywire and there

My biggest gripe with Rails is the magic it has. It's amazing for small projects but once you reach a certain size for the codebase, things go haywire and there's nothing that stops one from writing atrocious code (I've seen that happen a lot). The platform involves no compilation, and if you ship the code without tests (which is more often the case unfortunately), things are going to crap out only in Production. Not just that, development also becomes slow because of increasing codebase size, engineers start to get confused and run in circles when trying to find what came from where. Not to mention the non-existent concurrency model. Elixir, though with a steep learning curve seems to continue to pique my interest and curiosity.

iudqnolq 5y ago
One data point on the learning curve not being that steep: As a second year college student I did a <3,000 loc toy project to learn Elixir, and then used it (with Phoenix and Phoenix LiveView) for my first job, building a dashboard for a nonprofit. While there are bits I'd definitely rather refactor given infinite budget, overall I'm surprised by how well the project went. The dashboard has been humming along with zero application-level maintaince (just upgrading the Ubuntu version of the server) for months, despite being built by a novice and integrating with an extremely flaky third party API. It was very easy to set up a scheduled ETL job with Oban and add a status page so that they can see if any import has failed recently.