3 ms·

After Elixir announcing being "feature complete" a few years ago, and then Phoenix going down the LiveView path for quite sometime ... I feel like the Phoenix/E

After Elixir announcing being "feature complete" a few years ago, and then Phoenix going down the LiveView path for quite sometime ... I feel like the Phoenix/Elixir stack became less exciting to me. Hope to be wrong though. Erlang based systems are really interesting and under appreciated.

recroad 1y ago
Can you explain more? What became less exciting and why exactly?
- alberth 1y ago
  It just felt like momentum slowed and/or there was less PR about Elixir/Phoenix. But I could be completely wrong (or have the wrong perception). Note: not at all suggesting hardwork/progress isn't being made.
  - dsiegel2275 1y ago
    I've been developing full-time in Elixir / Phoenix for the last 6 years. I can assure you, momentum in the ecosystem has not slowed at all since the language was declared to be "feature complete".
  - bluehatbrit 1y ago
    The pace of new things coming to the ecosystem hasn't slowed at all, but it's happening beyond the language itself now. Just look at projects like Nx, LiveBook, Explorer, Flame, and Nerves. All are making big steps forward and releasing new and interesting things. As someone who uses the stack daily this is really wonderful. In the elixir world you just don't really have the problem where two tools don't work well together because they're built around very different versions of the language and runtime. I can pick up any elixir based tool and knowledge I can slot it into my tool chain or project and it'll just work. To me this is even more exciting because it suggests a stable foundation, and makes it easy to adopt new developments. But I appreciate those projects aren't discussed as much on HN.
  - bargainbin 1y ago
    In your defence, the choice of wording is confusing and that particular announcement did have a sense of “game over”ness to it. But the intent was to say that Elixir as it stands from a paradigm perspective is done, but the existing features and runtime will still be improved. Which as someone with many years in .NET, I can appreciate. I showed a friend who used C# since the first beta, who’s been hands off for over half a decade now, some modern C# code, and he could not believe what he was seeing. Much like I can’t believe what I’m seeing when I review a C# code base and have no idea what flavour du jour the developers decided to write it with and how I have to frame the program in my mind to understand it. Compared to Elixir, which just looks like Elixir has always looked, and does what you expect.
  - sergiotapia 1y ago
    Elixir and Phoenix are as big as they ever will be. Around 25% of the size of the Rails "mindshare". But still I love the Elixir stack to death, it's so wonderful. The one big thing they got cooking are types. Maybe that's enough to bring it to more people. Just make peace with the fact that it's around 25% the size of Rails market.
riffraff 1y ago
hasn't elixir kept innovating? The whole static typing/inference system seems pretty cool and keeps improving. edit: eh, I just went to check and they just has a release today :D https://elixir-lang.org/blog/2025/10/16/elixir-v1-19-0-released/ https://elixir-lang.org/blog/2025/10/16/elixir-v1-19-0-relea...
deleted 1y ago
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toast0 1y ago
> I feel like the Phoenix/Elixir stack became less exciting to me. Isn't that what's supposed to happen? It's not really fun to build on top of an exciting platform. Boring means if I build it today, it's likely to continue working for a long time. I've always got more to do than time to do it, so having to rebuild everything all the time because of underlying excitement is not by idea of a good time.

recroad 1y ago

Can you explain more? What became less exciting and why exactly?

alberth 1y ago
It just felt like momentum slowed and/or there was less PR about Elixir/Phoenix. But I could be completely wrong (or have the wrong perception). Note: not at all suggesting hardwork/progress isn't being made.
- dsiegel2275 1y ago
  I've been developing full-time in Elixir / Phoenix for the last 6 years. I can assure you, momentum in the ecosystem has not slowed at all since the language was declared to be "feature complete".
- bluehatbrit 1y ago
  The pace of new things coming to the ecosystem hasn't slowed at all, but it's happening beyond the language itself now. Just look at projects like Nx, LiveBook, Explorer, Flame, and Nerves. All are making big steps forward and releasing new and interesting things. As someone who uses the stack daily this is really wonderful. In the elixir world you just don't really have the problem where two tools don't work well together because they're built around very different versions of the language and runtime. I can pick up any elixir based tool and knowledge I can slot it into my tool chain or project and it'll just work. To me this is even more exciting because it suggests a stable foundation, and makes it easy to adopt new developments. But I appreciate those projects aren't discussed as much on HN.
- bargainbin 1y ago
  In your defence, the choice of wording is confusing and that particular announcement did have a sense of “game over”ness to it. But the intent was to say that Elixir as it stands from a paradigm perspective is done, but the existing features and runtime will still be improved. Which as someone with many years in .NET, I can appreciate. I showed a friend who used C# since the first beta, who’s been hands off for over half a decade now, some modern C# code, and he could not believe what he was seeing. Much like I can’t believe what I’m seeing when I review a C# code base and have no idea what flavour du jour the developers decided to write it with and how I have to frame the program in my mind to understand it. Compared to Elixir, which just looks like Elixir has always looked, and does what you expect.
- sergiotapia 1y ago
  Elixir and Phoenix are as big as they ever will be. Around 25% of the size of the Rails "mindshare". But still I love the Elixir stack to death, it's so wonderful. The one big thing they got cooking are types. Maybe that's enough to bring it to more people. Just make peace with the fact that it's around 25% the size of Rails market.

riffraff 1y ago

hasn't elixir kept innovating? The whole static typing/inference system seems pretty cool and keeps improving. edit: eh, I just went to check and they just has a release today :D https://elixir-lang.org/blog/2025/10/16/elixir-v1-19-0-released/ https://elixir-lang.org/blog/2025/10/16/elixir-v1-19-0-relea...

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

toast0 1y ago

> I feel like the Phoenix/Elixir stack became less exciting to me. Isn't that what's supposed to happen? It's not really fun to build on top of an exciting platform. Boring means if I build it today, it's likely to continue working for a long time. I've always got more to do than time to do it, so having to rebuild everything all the time because of underlying excitement is not by idea of a good time.