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Elixir and Ruby have nothing in common as languages and ecosystems, I really don't get why the 2 keep being brought up together. Oh I do get it - whenever someo

Elixir and Ruby have nothing in common as languages and ecosystems, I really don't get why the 2 keep being brought up together. Oh I do get it - whenever someone mentions Ruby some Elixir user will say - hey have u tried Elixir?

regularfry 5y ago
Ruby and Elixir do have surface syntax in common, and Rails and Phoenix are clearly from the same conceptual direction. They're more similar than, say, Rails and Spring Boot. This is not surprising: the Elixir folks were fairly high-visibility in the Ruby community before they did Elixir and Phoenix.
- montblanc 5y ago
  I'll give you surface syntax in common, other than that not much. I think a Rails dev would have a much easier time picking up Django or Laravel than Phoenix. How hard is the switch from Rails to Django? Probably trivial. But Ruby to Elixir is a mind shift.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - eropple 5y ago
    Ruby to Elixir is a mind shift. Rails to Phoenix...I don't think so. But most Rails programmers write Rails, not Ruby, and it's important to differentiate them. Ruby is a big playground. Rails is...not, by design. (This is why I do not like Rails, personally--if I am choosing to write code in Ruby, it's because I expect to need to get weird with it.) Rails->Phoenix omits a lot of the stuff that makes Elixir cool, both in itself and in OTP, but that's not a bad thing and I do think the transfer isn't too onerous for somebody coming purely from Rails.
    - montblanc 5y ago
      > But most Rails programmers write Rails, not Ruby You're really exaggerating.
      - eropple 5y ago
        I'm really not. I've built tools and systems around Rails for a long time. Most Rails programmers I've worked with live in the controller and the view. Absolutely there are those who do not--and they're often building libraries and tooling for those who do. IME, at the hireable junior/mid levels, Rails driving is pretty tightly coupled to the framework--this is often a positive, to be clear, and not a dunk on anybody. This is the baseline way to get a web application out the door. Roughly equivalent interfaces exist in Phoenix, and the mapping isn't quite 1:1 but it's close enough that the adjustment is an adjustment, I think, and not a re-learning.
        montblanc 5y ago
        I partly agree with what you're saying but still - you're exaggerating. Doing Rails without a decent knowledge in Ruby is exactly what you said - it's being a junior. You'll rely on the existing codebase without any ability to provide your own ideas, only shifting code from here to there without fully understanding what you're doing and will always need a senior whenever things go awry. That's what being a junior is like in any language. I don't think we can compare languages based solely on the experience of juniors. I'm not saying it's irrelevant, it is, but it's only a part of what writing software is. In the end of the day you need the seniors and people who really get it to maintain the code and steer the ship in the right direction. But I do agree that Rails is a kind of dialect of Ruby and that you can get pretty far with Rails without being great in Ruby (you still need to be decent though, no way of getting around that). > Most Rails programmers I've worked with live in the controller and the view Where is the business logic at? They also write services or something similar or stick it in the Model. Whatever isn't ActiveRecord will be pure Ruby - Rails has no opinions there.
        eropple 5y ago
  - innocentoldguy 5y ago
    I have extensive experience with Elixir/Phoenix, Ruby on Rails, Laravel, and Django and I have to say I disagree. Rails and Phoenix are both opinionated in similar ways, both have similar generators, both have excellent/similar tooling, and many of the same ideas exist in both (e.g., Channels and Action Cable). I view Elixir/Phoenix as a natural evolution of Ruby/Rails.
NoInkling 5y ago
The creator of Elixir was on the Rails core team and involved in the Ruby community, even for a little while after Elixir was released (until about the time Phoenix came around). The Ruby community is where Elixir gained a big chunk of its initial attention from.
- montblanc 5y ago
  That doesn't mean much. He came from Rails and then switched direction to a functional, Erlang based new language. The historical "initial traction" also doesn't mean much. The two languages aren't similar at all.

regularfry 5y ago

Ruby and Elixir do have surface syntax in common, and Rails and Phoenix are clearly from the same conceptual direction. They're more similar than, say, Rails and Spring Boot. This is not surprising: the Elixir folks were fairly high-visibility in the Ruby community before they did Elixir and Phoenix.

montblanc 5y ago
I'll give you surface syntax in common, other than that not much. I think a Rails dev would have a much easier time picking up Django or Laravel than Phoenix. How hard is the switch from Rails to Django? Probably trivial. But Ruby to Elixir is a mind shift.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- eropple 5y ago
  Ruby to Elixir is a mind shift. Rails to Phoenix...I don't think so. But most Rails programmers write Rails, not Ruby, and it's important to differentiate them. Ruby is a big playground. Rails is...not, by design. (This is why I do not like Rails, personally--if I am choosing to write code in Ruby, it's because I expect to need to get weird with it.) Rails->Phoenix omits a lot of the stuff that makes Elixir cool, both in itself and in OTP, but that's not a bad thing and I do think the transfer isn't too onerous for somebody coming purely from Rails.
  - montblanc 5y ago
    > But most Rails programmers write Rails, not Ruby You're really exaggerating.
    - eropple 5y ago
      I'm really not. I've built tools and systems around Rails for a long time. Most Rails programmers I've worked with live in the controller and the view. Absolutely there are those who do not--and they're often building libraries and tooling for those who do. IME, at the hireable junior/mid levels, Rails driving is pretty tightly coupled to the framework--this is often a positive, to be clear, and not a dunk on anybody. This is the baseline way to get a web application out the door. Roughly equivalent interfaces exist in Phoenix, and the mapping isn't quite 1:1 but it's close enough that the adjustment is an adjustment, I think, and not a re-learning.
      - montblanc 5y ago
        I partly agree with what you're saying but still - you're exaggerating. Doing Rails without a decent knowledge in Ruby is exactly what you said - it's being a junior. You'll rely on the existing codebase without any ability to provide your own ideas, only shifting code from here to there without fully understanding what you're doing and will always need a senior whenever things go awry. That's what being a junior is like in any language. I don't think we can compare languages based solely on the experience of juniors. I'm not saying it's irrelevant, it is, but it's only a part of what writing software is. In the end of the day you need the seniors and people who really get it to maintain the code and steer the ship in the right direction. But I do agree that Rails is a kind of dialect of Ruby and that you can get pretty far with Rails without being great in Ruby (you still need to be decent though, no way of getting around that). > Most Rails programmers I've worked with live in the controller and the view Where is the business logic at? They also write services or something similar or stick it in the Model. Whatever isn't ActiveRecord will be pure Ruby - Rails has no opinions there.
        eropple 5y ago
- innocentoldguy 5y ago
  I have extensive experience with Elixir/Phoenix, Ruby on Rails, Laravel, and Django and I have to say I disagree. Rails and Phoenix are both opinionated in similar ways, both have similar generators, both have excellent/similar tooling, and many of the same ideas exist in both (e.g., Channels and Action Cable). I view Elixir/Phoenix as a natural evolution of Ruby/Rails.

NoInkling 5y ago

The creator of Elixir was on the Rails core team and involved in the Ruby community, even for a little while after Elixir was released (until about the time Phoenix came around). The Ruby community is where Elixir gained a big chunk of its initial attention from.

montblanc 5y ago
That doesn't mean much. He came from Rails and then switched direction to a functional, Erlang based new language. The historical "initial traction" also doesn't mean much. The two languages aren't similar at all.