Re: Ask HN: Are you satisfied with Elixir or do you re...
My company is moving away from it. We built a few services but after a few years some of the original people that introduced it left the company and it became very difficult to hire for. New hires were either people wanting to learn (so we had to spend a good bunch of resources into teaching + end up with a system built by noobs to the language) or very expensive developers with a lot of experience in erlang and elixir.
We also found many times missing libraries, or found libraries which are incomplete, or unmaintained or just not well documented. Just compare the total amount of libraries in Hex, vs the total amount of libraries in rubygems. Somebody will say "but Elixir libraries are higher quality so we need less, etc,etc" as if there were not good developers in the ruby world and every elixir developer were a rockstar.
Tooling is just terrible. The VSCode plugin is crap, kills the CPU unless you disable features. There is no IDE from jetbrains. There is a plugin but last time I tried it, it was even worse than the VSCode plugin.
Also, I've read some comments where people mention "we don't need redis", "we don't need workers" everything is so much easier. That was our thinking at first. But then you realize on deployments you will lose your cache, or your background jobs, etc. So you have to persist them either in mnesia or in the database. At that point you're just reinventing your crappy undocumented and untested version of delayed_job.
Most of what you get from elixir in terms of redundancy, high availability, etc you can have that anyway from kubernetes, heroku or any PaaS.... you will need more than 1 server anyway, so...
Liveview sounds amazing until you try to use it in the real world. The most minimum latency kills the experience.
In the end, we are back to Rails and much happier. Specially now we are using all the hotwire stuff. Not fancy, and not fashionable though.
midrus, 2 hours ago
My company is moving away from it. We built a few services but after a few years some of the original people that introduced it left the company and it became very difficult to hire for. New hires were either people wanting to learn (so we had to spend a good bunch of resources into teaching + end up with a system built by noobs to the language) or very expensive developers with a lot of experience in erlang and elixir.
We also found many times missing libraries, or found libraries which are incomplete, or unmaintained or just not well documented. Just compare the total amount of libraries in Hex, vs the total amount of libraries in rubygems. Somebody will say "but Elixir libraries are higher quality so we need less, etc,etc" as if there were not good developers in the ruby world and every elixir developer were a rockstar.
Tooling is just terrible. The VSCode plugin is crap, kills the CPU unless you disable features. There is no IDE from jetbrains. There is a plugin but last time I tried it, it was even worse than the VSCode plugin.
Also, I've read some comments where people mention "we don't need redis", "we don't need workers" everything is so much easier. That was our thinking at first. But then you realize on deployments you will lose your cache, or your background jobs, etc. So you have to persist them either in mnesia or in the database. At that point you're just reinventing your crappy undocumented and untested version of delayed_job.
Most of what you get from elixir in terms of redundancy, high availability, etc you can have that anyway from kubernetes, heroku or any PaaS.... you will need more than 1 server anyway, so...
Liveview sounds amazing until you try to use it in the real world. The most minimum latency kills the experience.
In the end, we are back to Rails and much happier. Specially now we are using all the hotwire stuff. Not fancy, and not fashionable though.
midrus, 2 hours ago
