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I was wondering why Brex left Elixir, and what happened to all of the tooling they created to work in the language. From their blog[1]: > Building and maintain

by numair 5y ago

I was wondering why Brex left Elixir, and what happened to all of the tooling they created to work in the language. From their blog[1]: > Building and maintaining internal libraries to support Elixir as our primary backend language became time consuming, and few other users in the ecosystem seemed to share enough use cases to make OSS collaboration mutually beneficial. The whole point of giving things, and contributing code, is to do it without the expectation of a return or that anyone will even use it. It’s the mystery and the surprise of the way in which others benefit that makes our entire ecosystem work. When companies ride on the volunteer labor of others to become worth billions, and then come up with all sorts of excuses for why they can’t give back... I guess the success of AWS demonstrates that nobody will care. 1: https://medium.com/brexeng/building-backend-services-with-kotlin-7c8410795e4b https://medium.com/brexeng/building-backend-services-with-ko...

cosn 5y ago
Brex CTO here. I completely agree with you, the issue isn't that we expect something in return. When you invest in a new language community, it's not about expecting something in return, you're investing in its growth. We've sponsored several core language projects and maintainers, and have open sourced many libraries, and we did it so that the ecosystem gets more fuel to develop and grow. But that also doesn't mean we never evaluate what makes most sense for us as we continue growing ourselves. We have >400 engineers at Brex, so many things internally have had to evolve over the years, including our decision to build things in different languages (we now additionally support Go, Kotlin, Python & TypeScript, each for specific domains). Even as we write more backend services in Kotlin, Elixir will continue existing for a long time, and we're continuing to work close with the broader community.
- numair 5y ago
  I appreciate the reply. I think you have good intentions. If you’re going to leave the Elixir world, it would be good to open source whatever you can on the way out.

by numair 5y ago

cosn 5y ago

Brex CTO here. I completely agree with you, the issue isn't that we expect something in return. When you invest in a new language community, it's not about expecting something in return, you're investing in its growth. We've sponsored several core language projects and maintainers, and have open sourced many libraries, and we did it so that the ecosystem gets more fuel to develop and grow. But that also doesn't mean we never evaluate what makes most sense for us as we continue growing ourselves. We have >400 engineers at Brex, so many things internally have had to evolve over the years, including our decision to build things in different languages (we now additionally support Go, Kotlin, Python & TypeScript, each for specific domains). Even as we write more backend services in Kotlin, Elixir will continue existing for a long time, and we're continuing to work close with the broader community.

numair 5y ago
I appreciate the reply. I think you have good intentions. If you’re going to leave the Elixir world, it would be good to open source whatever you can on the way out.