6 ms·

Lets restate the question, but this time include Erlang as an option: You’re about to create a basic CRUD server for storing configuration files (JSON, YAML),

Lets restate the question, but this time include Erlang as an option: You’re about to create a basic CRUD server for storing configuration files (JSON, YAML), with a web frontend. This will be used internally, with a few hundred daily users. No single file is greater than one megabyte, total storage is less than one gigabyte. You have today to complete this task. You’re given these language options: Ruby on Rails PHP Erlang C++ x86 Assembly Which one do you choose? Answer: Ruby on Rails. Not Erlang.

pkulak 5y ago
Have you tried Phoenix? It's... amazing.
weatherlight 5y ago
As a Ruby on Rails Dev of 9 years, and an Elixir/Phoenix/OTP(erlang) dev of 2 years. I'm going to use Phoenix/Live View. Every. Single. Time.
dudul 5y ago
RoR in 2021? Dude, that's just sad.
- joelbluminator 5y ago
  As opposed to Erlang?
  - yakubin 5y ago
    My (outsider's) perception is that Ruby came and went, whereas Erlang came and stayed. Talking about their popularity in their niches. It's also much older than RoR, so in that picture it's also likelier to stay longer, regardless of temporary fluctuations. I'd also like to learn Erlang when I find the time and use it for projects in the future, whereas Ruby was never appealing to me. Each time I had to deal with it, it created a mess in my system.
    - joelbluminator 5y ago
      > Each time I had to deal with it, it created a mess in my system That's fine, that's your subjective experience which I'm not gonna argue with. But if you're trying to say here that Erlang is somehow more popular than Ruby for web development (or in general) that's quite ridiculous, not sure I wanna waste both our time engaging that.
    - goatlover 5y ago
      > My (outsider's) perception is that Ruby came and went, That's like saying PHP came and went. Just because something is no longer the new hotness and doesn't get discussed a lot on HN doesn't mean nobody uses it. Both Ruby and Rails continue to be updated just like PHP and it's popular frameworks. If you compared the number of websites developed by either compared to Erlang, it's not even close. Elixir & Phoenix would be a better comparison, but Ruby is still top 20 in the Tiobe Index (PHP is top 10), and Elixir is somewhere hovering around the top 50.
      - yakubin 5y ago
        I don't see PHP this way. PHP was never the new hotness. It was never cool. Whereas Ruby definitely surfed the fad wave, and this wave is gone now. Similarly, Erlang was not a cool kid, it just was somewhere in the background at telecoms, and slowly started being used in other places. If I had to bet, I'd expect Ruby to be completely gone in 50 years, while Erlang will still be there.
        joelbluminator 5y ago
        > PHP was never the new hotness. It was never cool It was kinda the de facto way to make websites at some point, together with Perl. it was definitely cool.
deleted 5y ago
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bcrosby95 5y ago
Given the forgiving requirements, I would choose whatever I know best, because I'm not going to special snowflake a system unless doing so offers outsized benefits.
SirGiggles 5y ago
You make the bold assumption I know Ruby and if this is a time constrained project I would be more willing to use something I know intimately. What I'm trying to say is in this case, I'd rather use Elixir and Phoenix as I know that best at the moment.
dehrmann 5y ago
Whatever the org is familiar with. I like the question, though. I've seen small projects that see negligible load, but are mission critical, written in a niche language no one else in the org knows. The language handled the problem good enough, but maintenance costs were massive for what the project was.
joelbluminator 5y ago
Lots of downvoting but I mean duhh for the average app and average developer of course Rails > Erlang is this even a discussion? Anything from documentation, community size, Stackoverflow questions to libraries will be better with Rails. Ah but the comments now say that Erlang = Elixir actually. Ok, I didn't know that. I'd say the same thing though, Rails > Elixir for the average app. You don't need the extra complexity Elixir brings. Yes I know about Whatsapp; no you're not gonna be Whatsapp.
- weatherlight 5y ago
  as a person who knows and works both, Elixir/Phoenix and Rails. Elixir/Phoenix is dead simple. Theres no "Rails Magic." It's easy to understand what's happening at all times. You don't need to have a grasp of the internals of OTP because it's not that important for the problem described above, but it's there should you need it, wand why you do need it you just need to understand it instead of of a plethora of extra technologies/DSLs that you would with a regular Rails Application. with Rails you need to know/consider technologies like Foremen, Webpacker, Redis, Capistrano(or what ever), AnyCable or ActionCable, Sidekiq or whatever for ActiveJob, then how Puma(Unicorn, Thin) Webservers work, you probably need NgineX or something like it for reverse proxying. For more Rich Frontend experiences, something like Stimulus Reflex or a JS Spa(angular, react, svelte) Cron for periodic task, even stuff like periodically restarting your application. These are things you don't have to necessarily worry about in the context of Elixir & Phoenix w/ Liveview.
  - joelbluminator 5y ago
    You're just listing a bunch of tech here that probably many Elixir apps use. None of it is essential for Rails btw.
    - weatherlight 5y ago
      I'm listing the things I've used over the last 9 years of developing SaaS platforms in Rails. The beautiful thing about Elixir/OTP in general, is because you can approximate all those things that I listed above with OTP and core Elixir/Erlang libraries. You can't do that with rails, you need those other libraries/technologies/DSLs etc.
rkangel 5y ago
> Answer: Ruby on Rails. Not Erlang. Can you justify this? If you knew them all equally well I would suggest that Elixir and Phoenix would be an excellent choice, although I am definitely stretching the definition of "Erlang" to include Elixir.
cultofmetatron 5y ago
with those requirements, laravel would probably make even more sense. there's plenty of drop in code to get to 80% of what you need within a day or two and the perf is going to be better than rails. That said, I'm an elixir developer and I use elixir because I need to handle heavy loads and thousands of daily users with unforgiving uptime guarantees. Elixir lets me do that while keeping my hair.

pkulak 5y ago

Have you tried Phoenix? It's... amazing.

weatherlight 5y ago

As a Ruby on Rails Dev of 9 years, and an Elixir/Phoenix/OTP(erlang) dev of 2 years. I'm going to use Phoenix/Live View. Every. Single. Time.

dudul 5y ago

RoR in 2021? Dude, that's just sad.

joelbluminator 5y ago
As opposed to Erlang?
- yakubin 5y ago
  My (outsider's) perception is that Ruby came and went, whereas Erlang came and stayed. Talking about their popularity in their niches. It's also much older than RoR, so in that picture it's also likelier to stay longer, regardless of temporary fluctuations. I'd also like to learn Erlang when I find the time and use it for projects in the future, whereas Ruby was never appealing to me. Each time I had to deal with it, it created a mess in my system.
  - joelbluminator 5y ago
    > Each time I had to deal with it, it created a mess in my system That's fine, that's your subjective experience which I'm not gonna argue with. But if you're trying to say here that Erlang is somehow more popular than Ruby for web development (or in general) that's quite ridiculous, not sure I wanna waste both our time engaging that.
  - goatlover 5y ago
    > My (outsider's) perception is that Ruby came and went, That's like saying PHP came and went. Just because something is no longer the new hotness and doesn't get discussed a lot on HN doesn't mean nobody uses it. Both Ruby and Rails continue to be updated just like PHP and it's popular frameworks. If you compared the number of websites developed by either compared to Erlang, it's not even close. Elixir & Phoenix would be a better comparison, but Ruby is still top 20 in the Tiobe Index (PHP is top 10), and Elixir is somewhere hovering around the top 50.
    - yakubin 5y ago
      I don't see PHP this way. PHP was never the new hotness. It was never cool. Whereas Ruby definitely surfed the fad wave, and this wave is gone now. Similarly, Erlang was not a cool kid, it just was somewhere in the background at telecoms, and slowly started being used in other places. If I had to bet, I'd expect Ruby to be completely gone in 50 years, while Erlang will still be there.
      - joelbluminator 5y ago
        > PHP was never the new hotness. It was never cool It was kinda the de facto way to make websites at some point, together with Perl. it was definitely cool.

deleted 5y ago

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bcrosby95 5y ago

Given the forgiving requirements, I would choose whatever I know best, because I'm not going to special snowflake a system unless doing so offers outsized benefits.

SirGiggles 5y ago

You make the bold assumption I know Ruby and if this is a time constrained project I would be more willing to use something I know intimately. What I'm trying to say is in this case, I'd rather use Elixir and Phoenix as I know that best at the moment.

dehrmann 5y ago

Whatever the org is familiar with. I like the question, though. I've seen small projects that see negligible load, but are mission critical, written in a niche language no one else in the org knows. The language handled the problem good enough, but maintenance costs were massive for what the project was.

joelbluminator 5y ago

Lots of downvoting but I mean duhh for the average app and average developer of course Rails > Erlang is this even a discussion? Anything from documentation, community size, Stackoverflow questions to libraries will be better with Rails. Ah but the comments now say that Erlang = Elixir actually. Ok, I didn't know that. I'd say the same thing though, Rails > Elixir for the average app. You don't need the extra complexity Elixir brings. Yes I know about Whatsapp; no you're not gonna be Whatsapp.

weatherlight 5y ago
as a person who knows and works both, Elixir/Phoenix and Rails. Elixir/Phoenix is dead simple. Theres no "Rails Magic." It's easy to understand what's happening at all times. You don't need to have a grasp of the internals of OTP because it's not that important for the problem described above, but it's there should you need it, wand why you do need it you just need to understand it instead of of a plethora of extra technologies/DSLs that you would with a regular Rails Application. with Rails you need to know/consider technologies like Foremen, Webpacker, Redis, Capistrano(or what ever), AnyCable or ActionCable, Sidekiq or whatever for ActiveJob, then how Puma(Unicorn, Thin) Webservers work, you probably need NgineX or something like it for reverse proxying. For more Rich Frontend experiences, something like Stimulus Reflex or a JS Spa(angular, react, svelte) Cron for periodic task, even stuff like periodically restarting your application. These are things you don't have to necessarily worry about in the context of Elixir & Phoenix w/ Liveview.
- joelbluminator 5y ago
  You're just listing a bunch of tech here that probably many Elixir apps use. None of it is essential for Rails btw.
  - weatherlight 5y ago
    I'm listing the things I've used over the last 9 years of developing SaaS platforms in Rails. The beautiful thing about Elixir/OTP in general, is because you can approximate all those things that I listed above with OTP and core Elixir/Erlang libraries. You can't do that with rails, you need those other libraries/technologies/DSLs etc.

rkangel 5y ago

> Answer: Ruby on Rails. Not Erlang. Can you justify this? If you knew them all equally well I would suggest that Elixir and Phoenix would be an excellent choice, although I am definitely stretching the definition of "Erlang" to include Elixir.

cultofmetatron 5y ago

with those requirements, laravel would probably make even more sense. there's plenty of drop in code to get to 80% of what you need within a day or two and the perf is going to be better than rails. That said, I'm an elixir developer and I use elixir because I need to handle heavy loads and thousands of daily users with unforgiving uptime guarantees. Elixir lets me do that while keeping my hair.