3 ms·

You can hire any senior dev and give them the elixir book and a week to read it. You can also pick up someone junior who hasn’t learned anything wrong and coach

by ch4s3 4y ago

You can hire any senior dev and give them the elixir book and a week to read it. You can also pick up someone junior who hasn’t learned anything wrong and coach them for a few months. I’ve successfully done both. The org I work in was one of the Elixir lang case studies and we still love using it, and have very little trouble hiring. It would be different if we had to hire 50 devs in less than 6 months, but we just don’t need to do that.

Apocryphon 4y ago
Elixir is a functional language, which is definitely a less common paradigm than OO languages like Java, which Kotlin is very similar to. Plus you can hire Android devs.
- ch4s3 4y ago
  Yeah of course, but the FP stuff is not very complicated in Elixir land. The heady stuff from ML family languages just isn’t there. The process model takes some time to adjust to, but a lot of JVM folks have used akka which is inspired by the BEAM. The tooling an docs all guide you in the right direction and usually code in the wild aims to be straightforward. I’ve really never had trouble onboarding people to Elixir unless they had started learning it solo as a Ruby dev, then they typically have to unlearn some stuff.
- jrvarela56 4y ago
  Is this true anymore? I'm biased by HN content but feel like I've been hearing non-stop about FP for the past 10 years.
  - jedberg 4y ago
    You're hanging around crowds that talk about FP. :) Right now I'm working with a team where we're trying to introduce FP and reactive programming, and most of them have never heard of either one, or if they have, have never really used it.
    - jrvarela56 4y ago
      Indeed, it's so bad I've found myself in conversations where teammates go 'ew, look, a class' and I go 'a closure is a poor man's object...'.
      - markeibes 4y ago
        What's bad about learning the truth from your teammates?
  - egeozcan 4y ago
    If you are getting your daily dose of HN comments for a long time like me, you may also think there would be not a single dev that chooses Electron to develop desktop applications.
    - hardwaresofton 4y ago
      Of course not, because we're all using tauri[0] right? [0]: https://tauri.app/ https://tauri.app/
- cultofmetatron 4y ago
  functional programming overall isn't that difficult. day to day elixir work doesn't require you to understand currying, abstract types or monads. If anything it really only makes you pickup immutable data, pass by value, immutable bindings (with implicit lets) Functional programming gets really hard when you try doing stuff like state and IO monads. Elixir in contrast gives you genservers for state which is very simple by comparison as well as having dead simple IO. you don't have to make special functions marked as IO or use any type of exotic type theory. TLDR: yes Elixir is functional but its the 80% that is easy to learn. you don't have to bother with that last 20% of functional programming rabbit hole crazy town. source: me with 6 years of elixir experience and having built the entire backend for my startup in elixir over the last 3 years. Elixir is s a platform that fits a nice sweet spot where you need to knock something out fast and still have something reasonably maintainable (and refactorable) that also happens to be really fast(performance wise) for the level of day to day developer productivity you get.
  - redanddead 4y ago
    what would you say that elixir does better than anyone else?
    - cultofmetatron 4y ago
      better is subjective so I'd rather not go into that too deeply haha. Its all about the tradeoffs you're going after. If you absolutely need to cut down errors to a minimum and are willing to sacrifice developer speed/productivity, Haskell with IHP is certainly a compelling offer. (yes I know an experienced haskell dev will probably be jsut as productive as a experienced elixir dev but it will take much longer to train someone from another language to haskell than to elixir.) conversely, if you want speed at all costs, rust is certainly nice. now if we're talking Pareto efficient intersection of performance, developer productivity and maintainability, yea elixir hits that sweet spot well. I haven't encountered a language that does that better yet. Python comes close if you're willing to take a drastic hit on performance. The tooling is descent, the day to day ergonomics let me focus on solving our startup's problems rather than wrestling with the platform. It's not perfect (lord knows I wish there were more libraries).
RhodesianHunter 4y ago
That's great, but pretty tangential to my point. The person I was responding to seemed baffled that hiring Kotlin devs would be perceived as easier than hiring elixir devs, which is itself pretty baffling given that Kotlin is one of the top 15 most popular/used programming languages and elixir rarely even makes the list.
graderjs 4y ago
Just a question when you are hiring and posting job descriptions do your job posts use language like "6 years experience in Elixir" ? Reason I'm asking is because I love this attitude and I think it works so long as your team will provide the support for someone to ramp up, but I seldom see these kind of job posts saying we're fine if you learn the stack.
- ajmurmann 4y ago
  I share the parents attitude. My job postings though don't say explicitly that we are fine if you learn the stack, however they list the stack as nice to have rather than must have. IMO, everyone needs to learn a from of stuff for every job. Thus understanding of high-level concepts and ability to learn are paramount. If you tell me though that your primary language is XYZ and you cannot answer basic challenges with it we encounter during the interview then that's a really bad sign even if I don't care much about that actual language.
thexumaker 4y ago
Man I joined an elixir team to start my engineering career and while I love the language, and it isn’t too hard to pickup and read until you have to start mocking stuff and all the &’s start popping up. But still the pipelines and functional approach was solid. The problem was actually getting the stuff deployed or running into weird niche issues that require a couple days to fix. I was a bit out of comfort level at that point but the exaws sdk’s, confex, releases, supervisors. Made me really appreciate how much more support and just easier mode/python has been in my current job.
whoooooo123 4y ago
Where do you work? Are you hiring? (I am an Elixir dev)

by ch4s3 4y ago

Apocryphon 4y ago

Elixir is a functional language, which is definitely a less common paradigm than OO languages like Java, which Kotlin is very similar to. Plus you can hire Android devs.

ch4s3 4y ago
Yeah of course, but the FP stuff is not very complicated in Elixir land. The heady stuff from ML family languages just isn’t there. The process model takes some time to adjust to, but a lot of JVM folks have used akka which is inspired by the BEAM. The tooling an docs all guide you in the right direction and usually code in the wild aims to be straightforward. I’ve really never had trouble onboarding people to Elixir unless they had started learning it solo as a Ruby dev, then they typically have to unlearn some stuff.
jrvarela56 4y ago
Is this true anymore? I'm biased by HN content but feel like I've been hearing non-stop about FP for the past 10 years.
- jedberg 4y ago
  You're hanging around crowds that talk about FP. :) Right now I'm working with a team where we're trying to introduce FP and reactive programming, and most of them have never heard of either one, or if they have, have never really used it.
  - jrvarela56 4y ago
    Indeed, it's so bad I've found myself in conversations where teammates go 'ew, look, a class' and I go 'a closure is a poor man's object...'.
    - markeibes 4y ago
      What's bad about learning the truth from your teammates?
- egeozcan 4y ago
  If you are getting your daily dose of HN comments for a long time like me, you may also think there would be not a single dev that chooses Electron to develop desktop applications.
  - hardwaresofton 4y ago
    Of course not, because we're all using tauri[0] right? [0]: https://tauri.app/ https://tauri.app/
cultofmetatron 4y ago
functional programming overall isn't that difficult. day to day elixir work doesn't require you to understand currying, abstract types or monads. If anything it really only makes you pickup immutable data, pass by value, immutable bindings (with implicit lets) Functional programming gets really hard when you try doing stuff like state and IO monads. Elixir in contrast gives you genservers for state which is very simple by comparison as well as having dead simple IO. you don't have to make special functions marked as IO or use any type of exotic type theory. TLDR: yes Elixir is functional but its the 80% that is easy to learn. you don't have to bother with that last 20% of functional programming rabbit hole crazy town. source: me with 6 years of elixir experience and having built the entire backend for my startup in elixir over the last 3 years. Elixir is s a platform that fits a nice sweet spot where you need to knock something out fast and still have something reasonably maintainable (and refactorable) that also happens to be really fast(performance wise) for the level of day to day developer productivity you get.
- redanddead 4y ago
  what would you say that elixir does better than anyone else?
  - cultofmetatron 4y ago
    better is subjective so I'd rather not go into that too deeply haha. Its all about the tradeoffs you're going after. If you absolutely need to cut down errors to a minimum and are willing to sacrifice developer speed/productivity, Haskell with IHP is certainly a compelling offer. (yes I know an experienced haskell dev will probably be jsut as productive as a experienced elixir dev but it will take much longer to train someone from another language to haskell than to elixir.) conversely, if you want speed at all costs, rust is certainly nice. now if we're talking Pareto efficient intersection of performance, developer productivity and maintainability, yea elixir hits that sweet spot well. I haven't encountered a language that does that better yet. Python comes close if you're willing to take a drastic hit on performance. The tooling is descent, the day to day ergonomics let me focus on solving our startup's problems rather than wrestling with the platform. It's not perfect (lord knows I wish there were more libraries).

RhodesianHunter 4y ago

That's great, but pretty tangential to my point. The person I was responding to seemed baffled that hiring Kotlin devs would be perceived as easier than hiring elixir devs, which is itself pretty baffling given that Kotlin is one of the top 15 most popular/used programming languages and elixir rarely even makes the list.

graderjs 4y ago

Just a question when you are hiring and posting job descriptions do your job posts use language like "6 years experience in Elixir" ? Reason I'm asking is because I love this attitude and I think it works so long as your team will provide the support for someone to ramp up, but I seldom see these kind of job posts saying we're fine if you learn the stack.

ajmurmann 4y ago
I share the parents attitude. My job postings though don't say explicitly that we are fine if you learn the stack, however they list the stack as nice to have rather than must have. IMO, everyone needs to learn a from of stuff for every job. Thus understanding of high-level concepts and ability to learn are paramount. If you tell me though that your primary language is XYZ and you cannot answer basic challenges with it we encounter during the interview then that's a really bad sign even if I don't care much about that actual language.

thexumaker 4y ago

Man I joined an elixir team to start my engineering career and while I love the language, and it isn’t too hard to pickup and read until you have to start mocking stuff and all the &’s start popping up. But still the pipelines and functional approach was solid. The problem was actually getting the stuff deployed or running into weird niche issues that require a couple days to fix. I was a bit out of comfort level at that point but the exaws sdk’s, confex, releases, supervisors. Made me really appreciate how much more support and just easier mode/python has been in my current job.

whoooooo123 4y ago

Where do you work? Are you hiring? (I am an Elixir dev)