3 ms·

Don't want to spoil the party, but you could get all of this and way more with Elixir, running on a platform that was designed for this. And with LiveViews, you

by kimi 5y ago

Don't want to spoil the party, but you could get all of this and way more with Elixir, running on a platform that was designed for this. And with LiveViews, you could do without a client. Aren't you kind of reinventing the wheel?

paulgb 5y ago
It’s true that Erlang/Elixir/OTP have this solved in that ecosystem, as I mention in the post. When we talked to dozens of teams that have internally built tech like this already, only one had gone that route. In general I haven’t seen any really data-heavy apps in Elixir, are there examples I should be looking at? It could be interesting to compare performance.
jerf 5y ago
I think the founders have run through an analysis much like this one I gave ten months back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27195000 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27195000 Erlang/Elixir is a very neat little ecosystem, but in a lot of ways it's a dead end now. It was alone in its space for so long that it built a lot of ways of doing things that are kinda closed in on its own ecosystem, because there was no other ecosystem to reach out to to speak of, but now there's an abundance of choices and choosing Erlang means choosing something that is built on a lot of assumptions that don't match the world anymore. There may be some "reinvention" in building something on WASM and other communication mechanisms, but it's one with a path forward. In particular, Erlang/Elixir have a lot of integrated solutions for modern code problems, but being either first or very early, none of them are best-of-breed anymore. You could think of them as the first draft of a lot of modern techs. Between that, and the fact that you can't build a business based on going to your customers and saying "Hey, everyone, I've got a great platform, just allocate the budget to rewrite your entire codebase into this somewhat obscure language and we'll make everything all better!", it just isn't a viable choice for a business, or at least not one that has any plans for growth. (And I don't mean VC-funded hypergrowth... I mean, the regular kind too.)

by kimi 5y ago

paulgb 5y ago

It’s true that Erlang/Elixir/OTP have this solved in that ecosystem, as I mention in the post. When we talked to dozens of teams that have internally built tech like this already, only one had gone that route. In general I haven’t seen any really data-heavy apps in Elixir, are there examples I should be looking at? It could be interesting to compare performance.

jerf 5y ago

I think the founders have run through an analysis much like this one I gave ten months back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27195000 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27195000 Erlang/Elixir is a very neat little ecosystem, but in a lot of ways it's a dead end now. It was alone in its space for so long that it built a lot of ways of doing things that are kinda closed in on its own ecosystem, because there was no other ecosystem to reach out to to speak of, but now there's an abundance of choices and choosing Erlang means choosing something that is built on a lot of assumptions that don't match the world anymore. There may be some "reinvention" in building something on WASM and other communication mechanisms, but it's one with a path forward. In particular, Erlang/Elixir have a lot of integrated solutions for modern code problems, but being either first or very early, none of them are best-of-breed anymore. You could think of them as the first draft of a lot of modern techs. Between that, and the fact that you can't build a business based on going to your customers and saying "Hey, everyone, I've got a great platform, just allocate the budget to rewrite your entire codebase into this somewhat obscure language and we'll make everything all better!", it just isn't a viable choice for a business, or at least not one that has any plans for growth. (And I don't mean VC-funded hypergrowth... I mean, the regular kind too.)