I fully agree about how hard it is to understand what the DSL features of elixir are doing. It was a major pain point for me and I wish that Elixir had a mode w

I fully agree about how hard it is to understand what the DSL features of elixir are doing. It was a major pain point for me and I wish that Elixir had a mode where it would expand all macros and output the resulting code so you can just see what your code looks like. I think that would help a lot. On the flip side, most of these complaints feel like the author is fighting the language and wants it to behave more like a language that makes different tradeoffs. Maybe akin to complaining that Rust is annoying because "you need to use unsafe to code normally." For example pairing with statements with specific atoms is specifically called out as an anti-pattern in the latest elixir docs[1] (this is an example of the elixir devs trying to talk more about how best to do things!). I don't mean say that the author "should have known not to do that" - I use it from time to time. I mean that the language is not setup to support this code structure well. The language wants you do use different structures for doing a series of things (the Ecto approach of returning a structure with the error embedded in it is an example). I'm also sympathetic about the confusion around umbrella projects (and other such features) but I kind of feel like the current state is the optimal one? There's a tutorial showing you when you might want an umbrella project, but also showing you a similar structure that avoids using one[2]. On some level choosing which approach you want depends on a ton of details about "how elixir / erlang works"...but that seems pretty unavoidable? I think umbrella projects make very little sense until you grok the application system - but ultimately you can't save people from skimming over why they might use something and diving into learning it. I think this is just an inevitable drawback of languages that have fundamentally different tradeoffs than ones that generate native code with mutability. [1] https://hexdocs.pm/elixir/main/code-anti-patterns.html#complex-else-clauses-in-with https://hexdocs.pm/elixir/main/code-anti-patterns.html#compl... [2] https://hexdocs.pm/elixir/dependencies-and-umbrella-projects.html https://hexdocs.pm/elixir/dependencies-and-umbrella-projects...