TL;DNR, use a language your company can support. It doesn't matter how suited to the job a language is, if it's single Engineer or small team, what happens when they move on? How do you support it? Who's on call?

Not Elixir, but a cautionary tale from our Erlang project. ~8 years ago a our IoT backend was written in Erlang, this was the early days of IoT, so sure it made sense as a technology, could scale well, handle all the symmetric sessions, etc. It was a good tool for the job and in theory could scale well.

But, there's always a but. We're a Python shop on the backend and C on embedded devices. Engineers move on, there some lean times, and after a few years there was no one left who could support an Erlang system. So we hired for the position, and it's key infrastructure, but not really a full time project, so we hired a Python+Erland person.

But! Now they're on call 24/7 since the regular on call roster are python people and when the Erlang service goes wrong, it's call the one engineer. So, do you hire 2 or 3 people to support the service? No, you design it out. At the time is was 2018, and IoT services were a plenty, so we could use an existing service and python.

Another way of looking at it, let's say it's a critical service and you need at least 3 people to support it/be on call. If each engineer costs $200k/year, that's $600k/year. Does this new language save you that much over using a more generic and widly known language in the org?

Your comment was so spot-on that I suspected we worked at the same company for a minute.

Erlang / Elixir are languages that are easy to begin learning, but difficult to master. In our case, the team was able to get the basics up and running quickly, but the service became increasingly difficult to manage as our product requirements expanded beyond the strengths of the Erlang ecosystem's core competencies.

In our case, the original team of developers was excited to write a greenfield service in Erlang, but much less excited to maintain and scale it long-term. Some of them used their experience to speak at Erlang conferences, which led to them being recruited away by companies who were desperate for Erlang developers to maintain their legacy code after the core team left. Ironic.

At first we tried to train existing engineers on Erlang. Doesn't work. Not because Erlang is bad, but because people don't want their companies changing the direction of their career development just to support someone else's legacy project that requires an on-call team to support.

So your two options are: Hire at least 2, preferably 3 Erlang engineers for the reasons discussed above. Harder than it sounds, because AFAICT there are a lot of companies with 2010-era Erlang backends that made sense at the time but now require dedicated maintenance engineers.

Or you can rewrite it in a more common language, which is the route we chose. Rewrites are a difficult decision for well-known reasons, but ultimately it was the correct choice. Being able to drop 10+ engineers into a project as needed is a huge accelerator compared to funneling 100% of your work through the 2 Erlang gurus in the corner who maintain a codebase that no one else wants to touch.

You sure we don't work at the same place? :)

Hiring is nearly impossible, come support our legacy system, and what ever you do, don't introduce Erlang into any other part of the company. Why? We feel burnt on this one project, and god forbid we get any deeper than we are now. What this isn't appealing?

> there was no one left who could support an Erlang system.

If you have $200k "python engineers" on the payroll who wouldn't jump at the opportunity to do some additional Erlang, maybe it's time to reconsider your hiring practices and that is the real cautionary tale.

This, twice.

Back in the day people would balk at hiring Python programmers saying, "there are so many more Java programmers", and I used to say, "Why would you hire a Java programmer who was unwilling or unable to learn Python?"

Same logic applies here: Why would you hire a Python programmer who was unwilling or unable to learn Erlang? (Especially if you're going to pay them to do it!)

If you can't switch languages you're a kind of technician not a programmer.

FWIW, having done it professionally for ~15 years I'll never write another large project in Python again. Erlang's runtime is so much better than Python's it's just ridiculous. I feel stupid for not realizing this sooner.

If I had a Python job (a language I enjoy) and I was forced to work in a language I don't (say, Perl), I'd start complaining about it and looking for something else to do. I personally wouldn't mind working with Erlang, but that isn't the point. Many developers "can" do these things but it doesn't mean they want to.

It's pretty much how we treat our Python projects. All of us hate it, but data science is done in Python so we still need some percentage of the engineering team fluent enough in it to sustain operations with it (on-call, maintenance, bugs, eventual decommissioning).

The moment we can get rid of it, you bet we will. But it's much easier tearing it down when you understand it enough to discern designs driven by the limitations of the tech vs requirements for the product. Black box ground up replacements are hard and expensive compared to ports. Also, thankfully it's Python and nothing something more difficult/complex.

At the end of the day, it's a job, and there's an expectation of professionalism to do what's necessary. A lot of people on HN like treating tech jobs like a paid hobby which I think is detrimental to career development.

Regrettably, also back in the day and probably around the same time, companies who wanted to hire "outside of the box" asked for Python. Not because they were python shops, but because they figured that people who had an interest in a new but not-quite-commercially viable language must have some sort of intrinsic interest in programming, and would likely make for better programmers.

This is because those shops read the PG essays, and think that the the shibboleth is Python, it is not. The marker is that that someone is at the fringe and not in the middle of the flock.

I have met lots of engineers who are smack dab in the middle of the flock when it comes to tech stacks, or even _behind_, but they were more than capable. Hire for what you need. But what you think you need and what you actually need is probably not know to you.

Depends on the reason for switching. If I'm asked to switch because the new stack is going to have measurable improvements plus the language is going to stay and grow (just as examples may be Go or Rust right now), then sure. On the other hand, if the reason is because the company fucked up by relying on one idiot with an elitist mindset about programming languages, then that request going to have to come wrapped with very good incentives. If I'm a great java developer with tons of jobs to choose from, you are going to have to give me a very good reason to narrow my opportunities down for you. Otherwise, I'd say no and move on and you can go hunting for devs for a niche language and pray to Gods that the hiring situation will improve for you.

Your example of Java to Python doesn't represent the gravity of switching from Java to say Erlang or Haskell. You assume someone says no because they are unwilling or unable. We are unwilling, sometimes, because of the opportunity cost we have to pay for your fuck up.

> If I'm a great java developer with tons of jobs to choose from, you are going to have to give me a very good reason to narrow my opportunities down for you.

Why would learning a new tool narrow rather than widen your opportunities?

It's not like you forgot all you know about Java.

Learning an obscure tool that eventually dies is a waste of time. Think learning a language only you and a few of your friends speak. This in itself is good enough reason to be cautious about what you invest your time in learning.

Languages and specially the tool chain and the way of doing things around them evolve. If you spend like 5 years doing something else and come back to it, you'll find things have changed a lot. You may argue that it's easy to relearn this. But from a job perspective, the guy who has been using the exact same tech stack in the recent years will often be a better bet than a guy who wrote Java in version 1. This is very true for C#. Syntax, design principles, tools, method of deployments all have changed rapidly. Professionally, you want to be as up to date as possible in the area you worked in or you get rusty. You can learn new things on your time for their own utility. Flushing down 40-60 hours a week on a useless piece of knowledge is bad all round to me.

> Flushing down 40-60 hours a week on a useless piece of knowledge

That is only if it's actually useless. I haven't programmed in haskell for many years, yet I am very glad I did. It was hard at first, but it made me think about code, data and transformation from a different perspective, expanding the repertoire of paradigms, regardless of which language I code in.

YMMV, but personally, I'd much rather hire or work with someone with 3y java + 1y erlang experience, than just 5y java experience. In general a polyglot rather than monoglot, especially if it's a different coding paradigm. Nevertheless, I may not actually want them coding random bits of work in erlang or whatever random language.

Well, a Java developer isn't going to want to give up the JVM, their type safety, and great tooling, for a start.

I get being interested in Erlang if you're doing Python. But interested in doing Python as a Java dev? Probably not.

Seriously, why doesn't python have a maven equivalent yet?

And no fat-binaries. Nor self executing binaries. It's just as old and having em basically just boils down to enforcing conventions. But nope, nothing. There have been attempts by some such as shiv, but really... None are even remotely as usable as maven is.

Have you tried Nuitka? https://github.com/Nuitka/Nuitka

In the same vein there's also PyInstaller and PyOxidizer, not to mention platform-specific binaries generators (Py2app, ...)

You could containerize your python. That's like having a fat binary.

yes, you can do that. I've been doing that for around 8 years now.

And no, it's not the same. Not even remotely. The only thing that helps with are quick and easy deployments.

The thing which makes maven special is the ease of producing artefacts for deployments, not the final step of starting it up on the server.

Python doesn't require creating artifacts. It requires dependency resolvement which Docker is perfect for.

PyInstaller Nuitka PyOxidizer To name a few.

Can you expand what you mean re: large projects in Python?

Yeah, thanks for asking.

I've been a happy Python programmer for over fifteen years, so this comes from a place of love and respect.

Beyond roughly 150k LoC you start to run into difficulties keeping everything straight over time, especially if you use a lot of indirection or other magic. The aspects of the language that help you go fast when you're prototyping (is "RAD" still a thing? Rapid Application Development) start to trip you up when the codebase matures. There are a lot of fancy footguns in Python that catch you if you stop dancing.

Tooling is getting a little better (MyPy, et. al.) but at the same time the overhead of adding explicit type information erodes the advantages Python has over, say, Java or Haskell.

This is true of all dynamic languages. Rails codebases become a nightmare beyond a certain LOC. It’s taken a long time but now that we have languages with strong static typing but good type inference like Kotlin, Swift, Typescript etc the old fully dynamic languages are obsolete technology and will eventually be replaced.

from personal experience with mypy, the great thing about gradual typing in a dynamic language is that, well, it's gradual! when I want to do something extremely dynamic, there's no horrible reflection API in my way. but most of the time I can live happily inside the walled garden mypy provides.

I have adopted this attitude for personal projects & small companies, and it was mostly great.

There was at least 1 really large error that slipped into production because we were mocking an untyped service incorrectly (a mistyped property name), and the test passed, but prod exploded. It was embarrassing, and I certainly would have caught it with more mypy discipline, but overall the pros outweighed the cons.

At big companies that use mypy, however, this is problematic. If teams only define types for the straightforward parts of the system, then the types become less useful, especially as the company scales. From what I’ve seen, individual teams use an all-or-nothing approach with MyPy, so it’s unusual for an individual dev to sparsely type anything.

agreed - I am thinking more in terms of the common distinction between infrastructure/libraries and application code - I can write dynamic, well-tested libraries that are used by heavily annotated, checked application code. The types are generally more meaningful at that layer, and it tends to evolve more quickly anyway.

I'm not touching COBOL anymore for $200K

Completely agree. I worked at a company on a Common Lisp project where the Python crew refused to learn Common Lisp because they thought it would look bad on their resumes. This should be a litmus test for programmer quality: If they don't want to learn something because it's not "fashionable", they're probably lousy programmers who lack confidence in their own abilities. Do you really want these people working for you?

> Completely agree. I worked at a company on a Common Lisp project where the Python crew refused to learn Common Lisp because they thought it would look bad on their resumes.

They can put only "Python" on their résumés, right?

One would think they could just avoid mentioning Lisp. I still don't understand their reasoning.

The reasoning is simple: if someone thinks something would look bad on their resume, they probably don't want to spend time on it, either.

For example, I wouldn't want PHP or Fortran on my resume, and, consistently with that, I avoid them. I don't have an opportunity to actively avoid them, but that defense mechanism would leap into action, if called upon.

However, I know a thing or two about these; I'm not simply applying "meme-based reasoning".

This really is resume driven development into a whole new level. No wonder why some sane Programming languages Never made it. And it is the reason why I am worry about Ruby's future.

It's not a resume driven development but a proper allocation of personal time and skills planning for the future. What's the point of learning something you won't use in the future? If for the sake of learning then there are a lot of better choices.

Just don't base your choices on the spreading of ignorant memes.

Would you want to pass on Lisp because of the ramblings of a rookie web developer with no Lisp experience? That's what you might do if you believe the "Lisp Curse".

I'll be the first to admit... I'm a little conflicted by this..

I've almost exclusively worked on the usual procedural /OO languages professionally (java /c#)..I like to experiment and I've picked up a bunch of languages along the way (perl, python, coffeescript, f#, nim etc).. And its usually because I want to see what's different and spend enough time to do something useful (but not large) with it. Also, it helps you become a better programmer IMO. otoh, if I'm hired for my skills but then have to work on js( don't actually like the js eco system) or haskell (I gave up after trying and I doubt I'd become very good at it anytime soon if I were forced into it) I'd be not happy either (and IMO, with valid cause that doesn't reflect on me or my abilities)

I completely agree. Software engineering is about being a master of problem solving, not just being a master of some tool or technique.

> If you have $200k "python engineers" on the payroll who wouldn't jump at the opportunity to do some additional Erlang

Ah, sure they might be willing, but as a lead I'm not willing to invest in it.

1. I'm not sure I want someone who's got 4 weeks of experience in a language working on system critical infrastructure. Pick your time, does it take 6mo?

2. They have existing work, learning and working on an entire new language _AND_ new project is a huge task. Especially for non-trivial projects.

We could, but in our case it was a better engineering decision was to retire the old system and move on.

$200k !

Why?

This kind of sentiment come up every so often on HN and I'm just sick of it. Sure, programmers should strive to improve their craft, just like professionals in every industry. But there are plenty of ways to improve yourself and learning a new language is hardly the most effective choice (and in fact could be counterproductive).

How does learning a new way to think about a problem become counterproductive? Each language you learn gives you a new angle from which you can approach a problem. Is it counter productive to learn a second spoken language? I haven’t come across an argument against that, even learning a dead language like Latin or Ancient Greek has benefits.

Perhaps counterproductive is too strong a word, but there could definitely be problems in the short term. Programmers love to apply things they learned in their work, and taking a concept or pattern from language A and applying them to language B is a natural reaction. The most common culprits are monads and actors. Ergonomics (readability, cognitive cost, debugging, IDE support, etc) became afterthoughts in the midst of excitement, and the long term health of the codebase (and teammates) suffers.

I have made mistakes like that (introducing monads/future and making the team learn guava) and I still regret it. Its not to say futures are useless - there were a lot of async logic in the codebase and futures solve a real problem, but its not clear if the benefits outweigh the cost.

To be fair, if you’re rewriting an Erlang system in Python/JS and you don’t feel like you’re losing much, Erlang was the wrong choice from the beginning. The cases were Erlang shines are very hard to replicate in these languages.

> The cases were Erlang shines are very hard to replicate in these languages.

I'm just beginning to get interested in the Erlang ecosystem. Could you please add more color to this and give some examples where Erlang shines? IIRC, Whatsapp backend used to be on Erlang.

That would make sense that whatsapp backend is in Erlang. Erlang was developed for telecommunication systems where you need performance and the ability to hot swap code.

Erlang's hotswap and Python's hotswap are of comparable power, ie, both are crappy. Being able to do something isn't the same as doing it well.

You can hot swap all languages.

If you're claiming that Erlang is no better at hot-swapping code than "all languages", you haven't seen Erlang's hot-swapping abilities.

"All languages" provide you the ability to run arbitrary code, and thus theoretically support hot-swapping, but if you try to put it into practice you'll soon run into real obstacles you hadn't considered that either bite you or at the least make your job a lot harder. Erlang provides those practical solutions that make hot-swapping easy (in other words, practically possible).

TL;DR: On the question of buy vs. build when it comes to hot-swapping abilities, Erlang falls on the left while "all languages" start at the right.

I have seen it, it is no better than Python's, exactly as I said.

Hot swapping Erlang in production is rarely done, and if it is done, it mostly done during debugging, not serving production traffic.

I invite you to do a straw-poll on the erlang mailing list.

> I have seen it, it is no better than Python's, exactly as I said.

I'm going to have to call your bluff and ask you to substantiate your claim. Please show where Python provides, as a part of the language and/or the standard library, the equivalents of these Erlang built-ins:

1. Module versioning (via vsn)

2. The ability to run multiple versions of the same module at the same time, transparently and for as long as needed.

3. The versioning (via Module vsn), tracking (via handle_call/3 and derivatives), and migrating (via code_change/3) of State.

4. The dependency tracking and ordering between code updates of multiple modules (via release_handler)

These are the native features that make hot-swapping in production not only feasible, but also powerful and easy. Of course, these are built on top of foundational primitives that are possible in any language, sure, but not all languages (including Python) have these natively available.

----

> Hot swapping Erlang in production is rarely done, and if it is done, it mostly done during debugging, not serving production traffic.

> I invite you to do a straw-poll on the erlang mailing list.

I'm sorry, but this point you're introducing now is unrelated to the discussion we're having, so I'll refuse to respond to this in any way except to remind you of the point we _are_ discussing:

1. adrr's claim: " Erlang was developed for telecommunication systems where you need performance and the ability to hot swap code." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23286646

2. To which you responded: "Erlang's hotswap and Python's hotswap are of comparable power, ie, both are crappy. Being able to do something isn't the same as doing it well.

You can hot swap all languages." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23287624

Hot swapping support in Erlang is first class, but even with that, it is not an easy feat to accomplish in large systems. Which is why, in my experience, people tend to avoid it if they can do without it. Systems i have worked with either had scheduled downtime periods or one could easily take down a node for upgrades without impacting the general availability of the system. In such cases, there is no real incentive to invest time and energy in managing hot swapping. But if you absolutely need all parts of your system be up 24/7, Erlang has the best story I've heard so far.

Basically anything that is protocol-oriented like WhatsApp. A lot of people will say fault tolerant, low latency, highly available and massively concurrent systems, and they’ll be right, but I think that’s only half the story. You also get a battle-tested blueprint for building these kinds of distributed systems. You will find a pattern here and there in other languages and VMs, but the cohesiveness of the package (language + BEAM + OTP + observability + patterns) is something really unique. Compare this to the Java ecosystem, where there are dozens of concurrency primitives and an even greater number of distributed systems libraries and frameworks like Akka, Mesos, Zookeeper, Storm, Flink, Samza, Heron, Helix...

If the problem you're solving can be easily split into many independent, low volume, maybe long running, communication oriented tasks, you owe it to yourself to look into the Erlang ecosystem. Think handling signaling for calls, chat connections, inputs from millions of IoT endpoints.

>IIRC, Whatsapp backend used to be on Erlang

Used to be? I know WhatsApp switched from FreeBSD to Linux and swapped hundreds bare metal servers to thousands of VMs. I dont think WhatsApp ever swapped / rewrote their system in another language under Facebook.

There was some confusion about that a little while ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21111662

Afaik it still is.

I'm interested in real arguments were Erland would be better fitted than java/kotlin

“after a few years”

Key phrase right there. Because it doesn’t matter what language a system is written in: if management doesn’t bother to hire replacements until after everyone who understands that system and why it works the way it does has already left, of course it’s going to crater shortly thereafter.

That’s not a language problem, that’s a business continuity problem. And it’s lamentably common as dirt.

Any monkey can learn to churn code. Learning the business domain, what its problems are, and how to solve them; that’s the bit that actually matters.

PEBKAC, at every level.

Why not get your existing engineers to learn erlang if you have such a need?

Because engineers don't take kindly to companies changing the direction of their career development.

If you're an up-and-coming Golang developer, how happy are you going to be when your company takes you off of a Golang project and makes you the new Erlang person?

Now how happy are you going to be when you're informed that you're learning Erlang to maintain an old, flakey codebase written by 2 guys who left the company and are now unreachable?

Oh, and you're going to need to be on call for this because no one else knows how to fix it.

> If you're an up-and-coming Golang developer, how happy are you going to be when your company takes you off of a Golang project and makes you the new Erlang person?

In my mind good developers are not <language> developer, they are engineers that solve problems with the right tools.

> In my mind good developers are not <language> developer, they are engineers that solve problems with the right tools.

Given infinite time and no deadlines, sure.

But in the real, you can't expect your engineers to learn entire programming languages and associated ecosystems on the fly as they debug issues in production.

If your Erlang-based cloud backend starts going down, you can't afford to wait around while engineers teach themselves Erlang so they can begin to even debug the problem.

The point is that if you write critical infrastructure in a specific language/framework/ecosystem, you need to have people proficient in that ecosystem who are ready to go. When dealing with production systems at scale, it would be downright negligent to assume you could simply learn the language and framework on the fly if any problems come up.

Even Andrei Alexandrescu and Jon Skeet haven’t spent their entire careers focused on their favorite languages.

I can kind of get this if we were talking about COBOL or MUMPS or something. But being paid to learn Erlang isn't really in the same category, or the same universe, really.

Maybe the emphasis should be more on the disappeal of your role being changed to maintain an old, flakey codebase than on the language.

So how about don't be stupid about it and instead make three engineers devote 1/3 of their time to this? That way it's a broadening rather than a redirection of their career, they can help each other, the on call duties are shared, and the business isn't dependant on a single person.

To me, this is the sniff test of a good engineer. All the good engineers I've known would've jumped at the opportunity to learn a new technology on company time/money. The engineers that refuse to learn generally don't grow.

Yup pretty much. Esp when it’s something like Erlang that passes the sniff test as something that likely will expand your knowledge in a meaningful way, and be a long lived technology.

Yes, it doesn't matter if it's a programming language or another technology. That's engineers not worth keeping around, stuck in their old ways, sooner or later they'll make themselves obsolete.

I'm not a <language> programmer. I'm a programmer period.

The term used within my circles is 10x1 engineers -- they've replicated their first year of experience/learning 10 times over. Biggest thing to watch out for when hiring "senior" devs

Dedicating a third of my time to a language I had no previous intention of learning is going to be a hard sell, even if you label it as "broadening."

If I'm a python developer, I'm now spending less time on my core competency, giving other python developers an edge. Seems like you're actually narrowing my career, unless I wish to apply for jobs seeking mediocre Erlang programmers...

If you see your identity as an engineer to be one grounded in the languages you use, you have commoditized yourself, or are at least very junior. Programmers solve problems, usually with a mix of deep skill sets revolving around domain knowledge or knowing how to use computation, systems, etc to solve them. Competency in a specific programming language is far down the list of what defines the value of a specific individual engineer to an organization or project.

Well, that’s not how programmers are recruited in the real world though. Java shops will hire Java programmers, C# shops will hire C# hands, etc etc. Marketing yourself as a generalist problem-solver will get you, at best, in one of those nightmare scenarios where you’re the only programmer in a non-tech company.

I specifically was referring to your identity as a programmer, not how you market yourself. Those are separate things.

The OP said "I'm a python programmer", and discounted the value of learning something new like elixir because it would undermine this due to the opportunity cost, which implies they may be falling into the trap I mentioned. All other things being equal, someone who is reasonably competent at both Python and Elixir is going to probably solve many problems in a better way than someone who didn't have a broader perspective. (In part because learning Elixir stretches well beyond learning a programming language, it is an introduction to an entire distinct continent of distributed systems knowledge and technology - OTP, BEAM, etc.)

That's why you don't market yourself as a generalist problem-solver. You market yourself as an expert in C# AND Python AND Swift AND... whatever else you know how to use. With appropriate signalling to communicate your experience levels with each.

There are lots of senior roles that require oversight of multiple projects that are working with different tech stacks. Some companies specialise in a single language. But lots of companies have say 2 or 3 backend languages (say C++, Go, and Python), plus a website in JavaScript plus mobile apps in Java/Kotlin and Swift/Objective-C. Being able to dive into all of those makes you incredibly valuable to this kind of company.

>You market yourself as an expert in C# AND Python AND Swift AND... whatever else you know how to use

So that everyone knows you're full of shit? It takes years in a technology to become an expert at it. There's no replacement for the experience of taking multiple projects from inception to production to scale. That's how you learn about the inscrutable errors, fiddly configuration issues, and pitfalls that make you an expert at something.

"Javascript" though isn't Javascript. I mean it could be, but it's worthless in that context because what you actually need to be productive is familiarity with the browser DOM, current frameworks for frontend or backend, and basic project structures.

For Java it might be enterprise Java, it might be Android, in which case you need familiarity with those frameworks to be productive. For Swift it'll be iOS.

No one's "diving into" the codebase for an iOS app starting from "I mostly do backend web app development in Golang".

Are you an "expert" in all those things? I doubt it. In fact the worst possible thing you can generally write anywhere is that you're an expert in C++ which at this point is oh-so-many subdialects.

> No one's "diving into" the codebase for an iOS app starting from "I mostly do backend web app development in Golang".

I mean, I've certainly been expected to at previous jobs (my background being backend and frontend web). It was a steep learning curve, but in retrospect it was also an excellent learning experience.

> Are you an "expert" in all those things? I doubt it.

No, but give me time. I'd consider myself an expert at frontend JavaScript/TypeScript and backend JavaScript/PHP. I have a decent amount of experience (enough to get a job an X developer, not enough to call myself an expert) in a number of other technologies (e.g. Python, Rust). And at my current day job, I'm responsible for a React-Native project through which I'm getting exposed to a lot of the quirks of the Android and iOS platforms.

Go I've not used. But Go's a relatively small ecosystem to learn. I don't put Go on my CV, but I'd be confident applying to a Go job. C++ I've done a little of, but I'm absolutely not an expert. Although Rust experience means that I understand most of the low-level concepts and best-practises that aren't C++-specific. Still, I absolutely don't advertise that on my CV either. One day though maybe. I'd like to do some embedded stuff at some point.

> In fact the worst possible thing you can generally write anywhere is that you're an expert in C++ which at this point is oh-so-many subdialects.

C++ is a bit of a special case there though. Because

1. C++ is huge: it takes a lot longer to master C++ than it does other technologies.

2. C++ is wildly unsafe. Therefore the consequences of not knowing what you are doing with C++ are much greater. You'll likely end up with a crashy program riddled with security holes.

In contrast, I wrote a production Rust project with no prior experience, and all the things that would have been crashes or security issues in C++ were compile errors. So the only consequence of my lack of experience was that it took longer to complete the project.

>If I'm a python developer, I'm now spending less time on my core competency, giving other python developers an edge.

so this argues against the theory that learning other languages and other programming paradigms makes you a better programmer in the languages you already know.

Or at least, that it is less valuable than spending the same time learning your core language.

This might be true based on your specific situation (relatively new to the language, but already know some other varied languages); I don't know.

That depends what you learn. Spending 3 months working on a Rust project has done a lot more for my ability as a JavaScript developer (my strongest language) than spending those 3 months working on a JavaScript project would have.

FWIW I agree with you. I'm a Java dev and learning a language that's similar to it (C, C#, Python, whatever) does nothing for me but take away from learning more of my language.

Other comments say an engineer is supposed to solve issues with the tools given to them. I can solve issues in other languages, I just don't want to. How does that make me a bad engineer?

For one, because you select your tools and reject others not based on their rational merits.

Second, because you are also likely to favor recruitment of other devs based on this cultural choice not on their merit, eventually creating a clique.

Productivity and working knowledge of a tool do not count as rational merits? It takes years to really learn a language; a new framework and language per week is a stupid fad.

If I run a Java shop I want a clique of Java devs, not Golang or Rust devs.

There is some truth in this, but less than commonly believed.

A "multi cultural", Jack-of-all-trades kind of team, that have a broader knowledge of many tools and techniques but less in depth familiarity with any of them, is more likely to use less features from the languages and tools that they have picked for a few of their strong points only, and less likely to indulge themselves with a level of sophistication that benefits their ego (and job security) more than the project.

> If I run a Jave shop

So I know a Python shop must be a business that sells reptiles, but what does a Java shop sell?

Most of the tools we use are language agnostic - databases, message brokers, containers, kubernetes, etc.

>So I know a Python shop must be a business that sells reptiles, but what does a Java shop sell?

Coffee obviously.

A good engineer will prefer some language(s), but be able to figure out anything should the job require it. This career track shift stuff is complete bullshit.

The workers are settled and and don't want change. And there's nothing wrong with clocking in and out and not giving a shit about your "career". But there is something wrong with the managers falling for this.

> So how about don't be stupid about it and instead make three engineers devote 1/3 of their time to this?

If your product-critical cloud backend depends on people being knowledgeable in a specific programming language, you don't make it a 1/3 time side project for multiple engineers.

Also, if you start giving people "1/3 time" responsibilities, you're one step away from "everything is top priority" territory.

The point is: If you're going to write critical pieces of your infrastructure in a specific language, it's a requirement to have at least one person full-time dedicated to that piece of infrastructure.

When things go wrong at scale, you can't depend on a group of people for whom this is a part-time side project.

You don't give it to 3 random people. You give it to a team which depends on it. It's not a side project because if that breaks your project breaks.

My least favorite part about HN is trying to share advice based on real-world experience, only to people show up and armchair quarterback the situation with solutions that sound easy on paper.

You'll have to trust me that we didn't just throw our hands up in the air when dealing with the Erlang situation. We tried a lot of the suggestions here and more.

Erlang is one of those languages that, for whatever reason, lulls engineers into a false expectation that they can pick it up over a few weekends and start knocking out IoT-scale solutions serving 6- and 7-figure connection counts. Speaking from direct experience, that's not only untrue, but it's a dangerous misconception that leads to a lot of pitfalls.

Don't get me wrong, Erlang is great if your problem set matches up neatly to core OTP functionality and well-defined patterns, but you don't have to stray far until you start finding difficult pitfalls that aren't easily addressed by engineers learning Erlang on the fly.

Sorry if I wasn't clear. I'm not questioning why you switched from an otherwise unused technology. Sometimes it's the best way forward. My comment is meant for this sentence:

> Also, if you start giving people "1/3 time" responsibilities, you're one step away from "everything is top priority" territory.

I like to maintain and improve legacy systems and usually happy to do it. When I got a separate side-project I had constantly fight with my team why I should work on project X instead of contributing to our core project. If it was my whole team responsibility they were happy that somebody does it. Also, they wanted to invest enough time so it won't break.

Defining yourself or others by a single language is in my mind a huge red flag of a very junior programmer.

Because "learning" Erlang is like learning any language. Sure, you can learn the language in short period of time, but really being able to professionally support a production level app to the level needed will take a long time and a lot of practice. And that practice isn't a week long course where you suddenly learned Erlang and then that's it. You aren't working with Erlang any more.

You don't need someone "learning" Erlang. You need someone who works with it.

All well and good if the engineers want to learn/work with that language. But not everyone does. I’ve left jobs over forced decisions like this.

Probably cost of training. You'd have to hire consultants to teach best practices and that could cost significantly more than hiring a new engineer. Plus there are other risks to maintaining two codebases in different languages.

You have to hire consultants to teach best practices?

Honestly it's not a bad idea. Erlang is not a language that is easy for an experienced engineer to pick up and quickly create maintainable code.

Whether you hire an outside consultant or not doesn’t matter. You have to pay the cost one way or another, either by your employees spending time learning the language + experimenting + making mistakes, or by going through some training and hopefully making less mistakes (not guaranteed).

Not saying this applies to every company, but I've worked at two different companies that have done something similar:

* Healthcare startup that basically outsourced its entire infra/security team from a consulting company. The consultants rewrote everything and took over engineering leadership, basically acting as gatekeepers for anything SRE-related.

* Worked at an older DNS company that hired a bunch of consultants to help engineers migrate their web framework from Play to Spring. Said engineers used Play because it was shiny but didn't have the Scala expertise to keep maintaining it, so they moved to pure Java.

I had the same reaction. However, I work for a small team with driven developers. It is expected from our engineers to learn “best practices” on their own time when we introduce new technologies. We are also compensated extremely well according to these expectations. If you have a team of engineers with a different mindset, you will need consultants.

One does not simply learn erlang

Yes that. But also only use paradigms which the company can support.

For example good static typing is not just about adding type declarations but about taking advantage of the type system to the right degree. (Like don't ever overdo it, it's killing productivity most times).

But what degree falls into the productivity boosting spot and from which point on it will hinder productivity depends a lot on the team.

The problem often starts when the team changes and e.g. a pure scala/rust/C++/Ocml team get people cross entering from languages without any usefull static typing.

What had been reasonable and useful might now be a hindrance to the team!

I ran into a situation where this caused massive delay. (Well through the actual root cause was miscommunications, people not complaining about problems and instead trying to find ways to fix them behind the back of other people force pushing nice looking simple solutions which just happen to fail many edge cases, killed the write, refactor, test cycle and increase maintenance cost longtime :( )

So well 1st never overuse type systems. 2nd communicate problems, especially if you have problems understanding anything even if it just takes longer then you think it should.

Our adoption of TypeScript led to a significant reduction in defects, and it definitely isn't killing productivity. Most of the time we take advantage of existing types so if anything it speeds things up in the long run.

You are misunderstanding what I mean. Through I haven't be to clear I think.

What I mean is code which not only uses types and takes advantage of the type system but overdoes it. In many languages with a powerful type system you can encode much more then just basic types and this is useful to reduce possible error cases. But if you overdo it the type system part becomes too complex, type error messages too unreadable and it hinders productivity and on-boarding.

I'm a big fan of static typing and believe that more encoding more constraints in the type system is _generally_ good. But if the resulting types become to complex it often not worth it.

I think I understand this one. I would restate it as "Powerful static type systems usually encode more constraints than you can easily reason about." And that's good(it catches your errors) and bad(you start to fight the compiler instead of solving the problem).

With simpler, more gradual designs like what are in Typescript or Haxe or even static, native-code languages like D, you have more escape hatches available, so you can iterate on the specification a few times and get code running quickly but also aim to make it tighter over time.

No what I mean is not that it encodes more constraints than you can reason about, but that the way some libraries abuses the type system to encode some of the constraints can cause more problems then it solves.

> Does this new language save you that much over using a more generic and widly known language in the org?

This is a great question to ask. It’s worth extending beyond language to frameworks and libraries as well.

It’s important to optimize for the development experience across all the apps in a team. Especially once the excitement of using a new language is gone and there are bugs to fix.

I‘ve rewritten a few projects in a common language for the org. Each time the biggest benefit was how straightforward it became to work on. Problems you’ve found somewhere else become easy to spot (and search for). Writing another test is the same as the last project you had open. Anyone in the org can contribute with a minimal learning curve. This can be the difference in getting bugs fixed in a day or a month.

Your "python engineers" couldn't do anything even touching Erlang? What

I think one approach when choosing more niche language might be, first look for a book like https://www.erlang-in-anger.com/, read through it and consider, if this is the sort of stuff my colleagues will want/be capable to deal with.

Then consider how hard it would be to get more people that have used such language/ecosystem in anger.

I have personally always appreciated the barbershop quartet...

https://soundcloud.com/pagerduty/servers-on-fire ah yes.

Been paid to write mainly Elixir full time since 2017. Still quite positive about it overall but I can talk about some constraints in an enterprise environment.

In a large company with lots of services in many languages, avoid putting business logic in your Elixir code. Business logic adds coupling to related code in other systems that often all need to change together, or get changed in a hurry. Either way, the engineer trying to do the change probably won’t know Elixir. Likely they were appointed to make the change by a PM who doesn’t know or care much about which systems were built in which languages and who knows those languages. And that engineer won’t know Elixir, and they’ll complain about being unable to work on your Elixir system, and it will give Elixir a bad reputation at your company in the eyes of managers and PMs. It won’t matter much if your system has high uptime or low tail latency or whatever.

The solution to this is to only use Elixir for building infrastructure. Nobody cares much what language PostgreSQL or RabbitMQ or Kafka are written in. You don’t modify the source code for those things typically, you just use them through some kind of API. Similarly if your company needs a notification delivery system, you can build that in Elixir. You just have to do it in such a way that nobody will ever be blocked trying to launch a new kind of notification because they need to learn Elixir first. Make it fully accessible and extensible through its API so they never need to know what language you used.

I work for a Ruby on Rails shop and we used Elixir for two projects about a year or two ago when it was getting a lot of good press.

The first project was an API that was intended to serve as a middleman between a few legacy services. Basically the company that hired us was building a new JSON API but didn't want to rewrite all their old code and our job was to consume the output from their ugly legacy APIs and produce nice JSON.

Elixir/Phoenix worked for the first service, but after that we ran into problem after problem. One of the legacy services used HMAC authentication and Phoenix (at the time?) didn't really support that. We were eventually able to hack around it without too much pain. Another service used XML and we had a lot of trouble finding XML libraries. There were some but nothing remotely as nice as Nokogiri. While all of this was happening, adding to our frustrations, a new version of Phoenix was released with a lot of changes. The only documentation for how to migrate an existing app was a typo laden GitHub Gist by the author of Phoenix. The final straw was when we got a call from the client about another service we had to integrate. This one used JSON but the order of the keys was important (please for the love of whatever god you believe in never do this). When we had to decide whether to write a custom JSON parser or move to Ruby, we rewrote the thing in Rails.

The second project was already a few thousand lines of code when we started working on it. It was a dumpster fire of a project but the devs who built it praised Elixir to the skies and said it was way better than their old Rails version. So take that for what it's worth.

We've decided not to do any new projects in Elixir for now but we're leaving it open for the future. It is a nice language to work with and, as you can see from the other comments, there are some projects where it shines.

I have two suggestions for you:

1. Talk to people in real life about Elixir/Phoenix. Most other devs I talk to in person at other agencies that tried Elixir have (surprisingly) neutral or slightly negative feelings about Elixir/Phoenix. Some percentage of people on Hacker News absolutely love Elixir (and often hate Ruby/Rails) and they usually flood the comment section of any Elixir article.

2. If you don't fully know the problem domain, use something with good library support. I don't know what your project is, but if you control the front and back ends or if you know exactly what features you'll need, there will probably be no problems choosing Elixir. Plus, it's always fun to learn something new. If your project is "some kind of API that needs to do X and maybe some other things we don't know yet" I would stick with Rails (or Python/Java/something with a lot of libraries). The worst place to be is not being able to do something simple because of a lack of library support and having to explain to your client/manager/coworker that it's because you read on Hacker News that writing "a |> b" instead of "a.b" is the future.

> If you don't fully know the problem domain, use something with good library support.

I think this is completely fair. As my friend says, "I don't know what library I'll need for every project, but I know where will be one for Python."

just because there is one doesn't mean it's quality. so then it's a worse scenario because you thought there was a solution, planned on it, but then once you use it you see it doesn't work the way you expect.

> Elixir/Phoenix worked for the first service, but after that we ran into problem after problem.

> Most other devs I talk to in person at other agencies that tried Elixir have (surprisingly) neutral or slightly negative feelings about Elixir/Phoenix. Some percentage of people on Hacker News absolutely love Elixir (and often hate Ruby/Rails) and they usually flood the comment section of any Elixir article.

This mirrors our experience, albeit with Erlang.

Every time I try to talk about negative experiences with Erlang online, people come out of the woodwork to pick apart my stories and assume we were just incompetent. Erlang/Elixir have an almost mythical reputation in online communities. A lot of people have completed some basic Erlang or Elixir tutorials and assume they're just a few steps away from running a massive WhatsApp-style backend, but it's not that simple.

If a company wants to go all-in on Erlang/Elixir and maintain a staff of multiple Erlang/Elixir devs for the lifetime of the service, that's one thing. However, decisions to write core features in these less popular languages should not be taken lightly.

You experience pretty much match mine.

My boss really wanted to use Elixir. Our CTO said he could only if he could convince 3 senior engineers and one ops person to agree to work on and support it. So he flew a whole team of us to ElixirConf. He organized a hackathon team around it. We rewrote some non-critical some services in it. All on company time and money.

At the end, none of the engineers could sign off on using it professionally at the company. Elixir is a cool language and it was a fun learning experience, but it's such a shoddy abstraction over Erlang and that's not a pleasant language. The operational complexity is really high, and it didn't solve our problems better than our current core languages did. The ecosystem was also really lacking in unavoidable ways for us, which meant we spent more time developing libraries that would've existed in any other ecosystem than actually writing application logic.

I'd say that it sounds like you made an informed choice, with proper upfront research on it. That's commendable, even if my fanboying over Erlang would like to steer elsewhere :)

My big problem is with companies that don't do any exploratory work like that. Write a prototype in new language/framework with the explicit idea enforced in project management that it's going to be a throwaway. Do a study through hackathon etc like your team did.

Don't just go on meme-driven development, which covers "CTO read a fancy shmancy content marketing piece in colourful magazine while on the flight"

Treating language choices like celebrity popularity contests and being afraid to wrap C or C++ libraries to get them into your non native language is a brutal combination.

It sounds like the parsing you needed would not need to be generalized, as you were working on projects for which you knew the requirements. In this case, writing the custom parsers should have been a simple task, and not something that would have stopped or even deterred me from using a language. Frankly, in general, writing a JSON, or even an XML parser, is not challenging and should take little time.

These days there's a multitude of both XML and JSON libs for Elixir.

Erlang/OTP is really cool and I found the Elixir language pretty reasonable and even nice but:

1. Elixir is still a pretty leaky abstraction over Erlang. In my experience it's not enough to learn just Elixir, I regularly had to dive into Erlang library source code to debug or answer questions. This somewhat negates the benefit of a small, stripped down syntax when you often have to learn another one in conjunction.

2. Maturity of ecosystem. This should improve over time but I've had challenges finding high quality libraries, especially for things like database connection drivers or making network requests. It's often hard to tell how well-supported or complete a library is and regressions were a regular occurrence.

3. Documentation. In practice I rarely found official documentation complete or even helpful (outside of big projects like Phoenix / Ecto). Even core Erlang libraries had surprising chunks missing. It's been awhile but I remember it being very hard to figure out what options were supported in Erlang's TLS wrapper. I ended up stitching together pieces from the OpenSSL documentation, Erlang source code, and lots of trial and error.

4. OTP overlap with other scheduling systems. This isn't a design flaw as much as a potential footgun depending on how you deploy Elixir code, but there is a lot of overlap between the cluster management support in Erlang/OTP and, for example, container orchestration in Kubernetes. Both support scheduling some concept of tasks, configuring redundant copies of tasks, detecting problems, and restarting tasks according to policy. Deploying an OTP application on top of Kubernetes (on top of Linux) results in 3 layers of OS-like task scheduling to learn, teach, maintain, and debug through, all with distinct tooling, terminology, and limitations.

All in all, I found Erlang/OTP to be a pretty interesting and compelling platform, especially for certain special purpose applications. If I ever use it again I'll probably skip the extra layer of Elixir syntax and write straight Erlang.

I've hit number 4 quite a bit. If there's a system that's entirely Erlang/Elixir it tends to work well, and is generally very pleasant to work with. This afaik is the actual usecase? ie not big distributed systems, but small(ish) self contained and self sustaining systems. And then you start layering these systems together with containers and ugh <shudders a bit>

I've certainly found it to be much more specialist than I think many cheerleaders would have it. It can do most things out of the box (and that I guess is the point of OTP), but to make it do those things requires quite a deep understanding of the platform (and that it is a platform, that the language is just a way to interact with that platform). Elixir is my favourite of any language I've worked with, so I'm not down on it, but it's not general purpose

This has always been what kept me away from Erlang/Elixir (which I gave serious consideration as both a project technology and a career path in it's 2010 era revival).

I've gotten to the point I can adapt to missing libraries but what it does at runtime is very different from anything else.

I don't do a lot of server side node.js but I have a lot of confidence if someone called me at midnight saying their node service was down I could jump in and start making progress fast. I think it would take some time running Erlang in production to get there.

My employer has chosen it, and while it was fun to learn and is very neat, I don't think I'd ever write Elixir code for anything but a hobby project, especially if a large team is working on it.

1. Dialyzer is just a huge piece of shit. It's an incredibly impressive piece of shit, and makes it possible to pretend that Elixir supports typing, but it has so many edge cases that we've run into them writing even trivial code - and it misses a lot of things that, e.g., Java or Typescript would have no problems with.

2. Testing is kind of fiddly and annoying. It's very difficult to consistently mock things out. And yes, yes, it's a functional language so in theory every function should be small and trivially testable, but unless you're writing toy code, eventually you will have dependencies you would like to mock out in tests, and you will have complicated business logic living _somewhere_.

With regard to mocking, I’ve found that it works better to swap in a fake process rather than a fake module. If you have a FooClient genserver that makes RPC calls to a service or database, make a FakeFooClient that responds to the same kinds of genserver calls and returns canned responses. Or even implement a simplified version of the external service in the genserver.

I did this and I found that as I increased the paralellism of my tests, the genserver got bottlenecked and the test suites started throwing heisenbugs, which is not what you want. You should really be using the Mox library, which I don't believe suffers from this problem.

Echo use of the Mox library! I found testing in Elixir to be by far my favourite experience (outside of Scheme, I guess, but I haven't done production Scheme). The REPL is really nice as well for exploratory development.

Right tool for the right job, I think. I’ve had absolutely wonderful experiences with Elixir doing web apps (both LoB style and SaaS style). Probably the best one, and it’s such a canonical example, is a group chat app using Websockets. It just feels so good, and with libcluster, multiple nodes in K8s can autodiscover and join each other. No problems at all having chats where the members are connected to websockets on different nodes; everything mostly Just Works.

On the flip side, I prototyped out a drone flight controller in Elixir thinking that the “fail and restart” portion would be awesome for reliability (if the RTK receiver craps out and restarts, no big deal, the EKF can just fall back to using the IMU until the RTK is back online). That part of it all worked great, but doing real-time numerical computing in Elixir is painful. As was generating the signals for the ESCs. I was making C modules to try to talk to the ESCs, and errors in those modules had the ability to corrupt the BEAM. I started looking at ports too (where the C code runs as a separate process), but gave up when it felt like everything was feeling way too complex and fragile. Let it crash is great, but “it crashes all the time” is not. I could have probably gotten it working, but... not a great domain for it.

  let it crash != robustness not required

Let it crash is an engineering design for systems large enough that statistically unlikely failures occur regularly. Like a data center or the original use case, telephone switch centers.

Even if let it crash worked, it seems philosophically inappropriate for a drone controller.

Not at all, "let it crash" is simply a way of phrasing "consider reset in your flow of control".

In embedded systems, certainly safety-critical ones, you have to consider the possibility of a reset path at all points in your flow of control. Your code resetting is a valid flow of control.

This is absolutely necessary to get a properly robust system.

Your drone system needs to be able to handle a reset at any point and still maintain adequate control of the aircraft. This is "Let it crash".

"Let it crash" is essentially the same thing. Take account of the necessity of reset, because you can't stop it happening.

Yeah; the basic philosophy of 'let it crash' presumes that the issue is bad internal state, and you need to get back into a known good state. If your domain doesn't really have a way to get back to a known good state, or a way to determine a state is good and persist it, it's not going to help you.

I see no incompatibility with a drone controller if you have enough redundancy or can restart services fast enough for it to not be a problem (probably 1 second is still ok).

What is completely incompatible with disposable workers is complex numeric processing. Unless you can segment it with small non-communicating unities, of course. That's the kind of application that asks for a low level language.

Just curious -- were you using Nerves[0] for the drone flight controller?

[0]: https://github.com/nerves-project/nerves

That was the eventual plan! I was prototyping stuff out on a BeagleBone Black with vanilla Elixir, and if the prototype felt promising I was going to bake it into a Nerves image. This was quite a while ago too; Nerves may have some bits baked into it now that might have helped.

That seems odd given that the BEAM was designed for reliable real-time telephone switching

Soft real-time != hard real-time.

Erlang is great at soft real-time but does not work at all for hard real-time, there simply are no guarantees, just very good average latency.

If you want hard real time (such as for in-flight control of a drone) then you should look elsewhere.

You're not wrong! I actually tried doing a bunch of research to figure out how the original Ericsson phone switches worked with Erlang, but couldn't find a whole lot of info.

At least we have this "Erlang: The Movie" demo to reverse engineer some bits: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BXmOlCy0oBM

That's awesome! Thanks!

IIRC a good way to put is that the phone switches didn't work with erlang, but the phone switch controllers did.

Doing Elixir since 2016, deployed multiple Phoenix Projects to Production.

Of you want to build dynamic web applications, phoenix+LiveView is imo _the_ best Option currently. It also keeps the promises: reliable (zero-maintenance apps running for years on heroku), productive (prototyping things is really fast: like rails 2/3 days), fast (templates render fast even when complex). It is also great to have actor processes and ETS at your fingertips.

Having said that: dynamic typing truly sucks for bigger projects/large teams. It is awful how much you have to write tests for, and these tests will slow down further velocity when things will change... stellar opposite to Rust.

Never attempt to do any serious number crunching in Elixir/Erlang, the BEAM truly is not made for this stuff. Plan to use/write NIFs or Ports for computational tasks. Even compiling larger Phoenix codebases will take minutes if you aren’t cautious of using „import“ in modules.

Finally: deployment is really the major pain point. I love the single file deployment story of rust and go.

From your remark about deployments, I'm assuming you're not using Distillery or Mix releases? If you use a release, you can deploy a tar.gz with "batteries" included (everything you need to run your app, including the BEAM). At work we have a dozen of elixir apps running smoothly in Production on plain Debian containers.

I've done both, much more Rails than Phoenix, but I'm not doing any new development in Rails.

I do regret choosing Elixir at times for the following reasons:

1. I am new to the language (I've been using it for "years" but only very part time (not part of my day job)). While the functional approach does lead to much more elegant code, it can also be super esoteric to me as I'm new to and somewhat uncomfortable with the idea of recursion for everything. There are pre-written macros to help of course, but it's just training wheels. This will improve with time and experience. I also don't fully grok how to write my own macros. What I really need to do is spend a couple of days deep diving until I get it.

2. Phoenix is changing quickly (tho slowing down). I wrote some stuff if Phoenix 1.2, 1.3, and the upgrade path is a bit involved (no more so than a rails upgrade was tho). I suspect it's stabilizing, but when I first created one project it used brunch for assets, now it uses webpack (which is a good choice, but as a non-frontend person I'm not well equipped to make the change myself to upgrade my project). 1.3 (IIRC) also dropped models, so that required some refactor to work as a 1.3 project.

3. Deployment changes quite a bit. The old rules for Ruby go out the window. You can still treat your Phoenix app like a rails app if you want, but it's like buying a Ferrari to drive around the neighborhood at 25 mph. This takes some learning, and while much of the old rules about scalability, etc are still applicable, they do change a bit and it requires making new mistakes and learning from them.

4. I get irritated now when working with non-functional code in other languages. My tolerance for side-effects is down to nearly zero, and I get irritated when there's a dozen lines to do something that in Elixir is a couple of pipes.

That said, overall I much prefer Phoenix/Elixir. None of the downsides are the fault of Elixir, so I believe with time It'll be a no-brainer. I am already at the point where I don't start any green field projects in Rails (tho I do use Ruby extensively for scripting as it's by far the best scripting language IMHO).

The annoyance over non-functional code is real.

I can't tolerate OOP stuff that `obj1.calls(obj2)` and changes `obj2` anymore. I didn't care before, now it makes me want to refactor everything or not write it at all.

Using Elixir kind of made me not want to use anything else.

Haskell's nice. Got some mature web stacks if you ever want to give those a try. https://github.com/Gabriel439/post-rfc/blob/master/sotu.md#s...

I've been developing Elixir since 2013, and professionally full-time since 2017. Honestly my only complaint is the lack of static typing. There is no way I'd prefer Ruby; Elixir gives you a lot more compile time checking and static analysis. As a project gets larger, it gets harder and harder to refactor because of the despair that sets in when contemplating fixing dozens or hundreds of broken tests that you can only discover by running them.

I really don't know what I'd prefer to it though, every language has its pros and cons and static typing systems while nice also can introduce their own problems. I've spent days tinkering with type abstractions in Haskell rather than getting work done - not because I had to but because I knew more expressive solutions were possible and the allure of them was too hard to resist. Elixir is a fantastic language for getting work done.

Just throwing it out there because I've had similar thoughts - that is, I enjoy Elixir but would be uneasy embarking on a large project without better static analysis, and also wonder what better fits the bill of a statically typed server application language - maybe check out Kotlin. I was very pleasantly surprised when going back to Java from Ruby that I found it much nicer, and Kotlin looks very similar but with a few key ergonomics improvements. I haven't used it for anything sizable myself, but I will definitely evaluate it next time I start something new.

That's funny you say that - I've been following Kotlin a long time and lately have been getting interested in it again; somehow my thoughts keep leading there.

If anything holds me back its my experience with Scala. I used Scala for awhile (actually it was my introduction to functional programming) and I like the language but everything about it that seemed to make me unhappy was related to the tooling and JVM ecosystem in general. I should give Kotlin a real chance on a small project though as I haven't done that yet, I've just read the language guides.

Though I prefer Scala the language, Kotlin is really nice and has pretty straightforward tooling (seriously why is sbt what I'm stuck with), as well as really awesome (unsurprisingly) Intellij support.

I may prefer Scala in theory but it seems to me that Kotlin would work better in practice. And my thinking has shifted to where I've started preferring languages that I prefer in practice in theory too.

We are EOL'ing Elixir at work - almost all of our stuff is built with Rails. My personal web projects are back to using Rails. I also never did contract work that produced Phoenix apps because I don't want to leave clients with something that they can't easily find support for later on.

Lots of great ideas in Elixir, Phoenix, and Ecto, but it just didn't hit the critical mass or completeness that makes the Rails ecosystem impossible to walk away from.

And because abandoning Rails is not a practical option, maintaining brainspace for an additional thing that is not widely used and nearly identical in function is not worth the cost.

Sadly.

I've been using Elixir for three years in a production setting with a small team of engineers. I still love the language, the community, and everything it has taught me as an engineer. However, there are real downsides to moving forward with Elixir:

- If your engineers are used to the Ruby, JS, Python etc. ecosystems of finding a library for everything, they may become frustrated with the smaller Elixir ecosystem. In my experience, this is actually fine because it means you have fewer external dependencies to wrangle.

- Differences between compile-time and run-time configuration is a foot gun. We ended up moving almost everything to run-time configuration, which is not what you see recommended by many libraries and examples. This is slowly changing however.

- Deployment is a bit unique, and working with building releases can be confusing for those used to deploying dynamic languages that are not compiled.

- Functional programming requires unlearning many OOP best practices. This can slow down engineers new to the language.

A lot of these issues IMO comes from how Elixir was initially marketed as a "fast Ruby" and Phoneix "fast Rails". Once you get past the syntactical similarities you realize the semantics are very, very different. Elixir is much closer to Erlang and Clojure than it is to Ruby.

Elixir is an excellent language for motivated engineers solving novel problems. If you are building a standard CRUD app, I think you will find more success with Rails or Django in 2020.

I’m primarily a C++ dev, so that colors a lot of what I think about the 3rd party library situation in Elixir. Because of the abysmal state of package management in C++, it’s usually easier to implement stuff yourself (tailored exactly to your own needs, and therefore with an extremely limited scope) than it is to bring in a heavyweight third-party library.

For that reason, I was pretty comfortable coming to Elixir and implementing Somewhat esoteric, games-specific networking stuff myself. It would have been nice if the library had already existed, but I am so glad I went with Elixir rather than Node or PHP (which both do have the game networking library I needed).

My experience has basically been that the “fat head” of open source libraries exists in Elixir, but the long tail of more esoteric stuff does not. By its nature, though, you won’t need 99% of the esoteric stuff available in other languages.

I deal with Elixir currently.

Although, actually, I'm converting it all to C#, since we don't really have a lot of elixir people in the shop (I had to learn Elixir just to do the maintenance when I came onboard.)

The lack of APIs can be painful at times. What is there sometimes isn't the most fun to deal with outside of the ecosystem (the driving force of the language conversion was issues using Phoenix Channels reliably with non-elixir consumers, and during the conversion we are dealing with the minor pain of pulling certain data out of an mnesia data store.)

But, I mostly enjoyed my time playing with it.

Biggest observation was that the IDE Tooling didn't feel as nice as, say, F#, which makes a bit of a difference when you're not dealing with the language day-to-day and need helpful reminders for how you're getting certain things wrong.

I can't say I regret learning Elixir, but a coworker once said he thought I thought it was the worst programming language in the world :)

My biggest annoyance with Elixir is that the ecosystem seems to impose a lot of opinion on how things should be done, and sometimes actively makes it hard to do things differently. In some edge cases I couldn't do the easy thing because it's "wrong", and couldn't do the right thing because it was not yet implemented. I believe this is with good intention and is mainly a side effect of the relatively small and young community, as in many areas the de facto libraries are made by the same few people. I suppose this problem will get better as there are more libraries to choose from and/or more contributors to those libraries.

Another, milder source of annoyance for me is the lack of functional programming features in a functional programming language. To invoke a function that has been passed as a parameter you need a dot. No currying etc. Still, you can get things done and with these limitations it's harder to get yourself into a mess of functions being passed around (but not too hard if you try).

All in all, to me what Elixir brings to the table is more than enough to offset its annoyances. However when it comes to choosing Elixir, I agree with other comments suggesting to choose something the team is comfortable with.

I'm one of those raving fans you talk about. I always love sharing the success stories of Elixir with everyone because it deserves so much more love than it currently receives.

I came from a Rails background too and Elixir is so much better than even Ruby (which I'm a huge fan of already) simply because it forces you to think in terms of functions rather than OOP based. Most people who try and give up early on Elixir - including myself (I gave up initially after a few weeks actually, before going back to it again) was simply because I was trying to code things like I would normally do in an OOP setting.

For example, you don't use FOR loops in Elixir, you don't nest switch cases. If you try to be in an OOP mindset with this language, you WILL fail. And that's a good thing. The language constantly challenges you to rethink a lot about your code. And it always results in better code when you do it functionally. Eg. using pattern matching instead of multiple if else clauses.

The downside of Elixir is the ecosystem isn't as mature as Ruby, so, for some of the things you're trying to accomplish, you won't find ready made libraries, or they won't be maintained anymore. Sometimes, you will be forced to write something from scratch and that can cost valuable developer time. Integration of stuff like GraphQL can be too verbose compared to other programming environments as well. But, the language itself? It's hard to complain. My entire consulting career has been built around Elixir since I made the switch ~3+ years ago. That's how good it is.

> And it always results in better code when you do it functionally

Hard disagree here. Functional code is often better, but certainly not always.

That sounds more like a "soft" disagree. :)

Well it's certainly better than dysfunctional code.

You are asking the right questions.

In our particular case,

1, we did not have good libraries for file uploads to Azure and to handle the signing for securely displaying them.

This was solved by 2 very simple modules. In the end, both things are fairy simple unless you want them complicated (ActiveStorage can sure do "more" out-of-the box).

This also means the code it's super straight-forward and understandable.

2, we did not have a good library for SOAP.

We started to build a simple SOAP library. This I would consider a pain, but there is always option to avoid it (see no. 3).

3, we did not have good PDF libraries.

I happened to package my Ruby library (using Prawn) as a Docker container and simply call its API. This could also simply solve no. 2.

On the other hand hand,

1, we got one of the best GraphQL libraries out there (Absinthe)

2, we got a really fast test suite (once everything compiles, that is)

3, we are getting great tooling like Phoenix LiveDashboard for free

Also I want to note that deployment is now quite easy with "mix releases" (as compare to what it was). You even get a remote console that connects to your running cluster. No problem.

[0] https://nts.strzibny.name/phoenix-livedashboard-request-logg...

I'm working for a software consultant in Singapore. We tried Elixir for a few projects, and now we're still trying. So, I can share a few experiences from my view.

- Elixir and the Phoenix framework is perfect when building concurrency systems. Our company had made a ticketing system, solving the tickets for "Cirque du Soleil - Hongkong 2018". During two months of the event, our system (one Elixir/Phoenix server - scale up to two - one load balancer) can handle more than 5000 tickets per second. We were so excited. Unfortunately, the client's company closed after that. So the project was closed too.

- The second project was a product of a finance startup. Not so much thing I can share in this project, but the main feature is chatting. We used the Phoenix Channel and Graphql Subscription for this feature.

- In the side project, one member of the team used Phoenix Liveview to build a Coup game (board game).

So, in general, when I work with Elixir, I see a few pros and cons:

Pros:

- Fast. Functional programming is really fun. I love pattern matching.

- Not so hard to write tests. It's easy to mock external APIs. (Check out this blog: http://blog.plataformatec.com.br/2015/10/mocks-and-explicit-...)

- Easy to deploy. After dockerize the application, I can run it anywhere. The ticketing system was run on AliCloud, and the second project was run on Kubernetes (AWS).

Cons:

- Lack of supported libraries for external services. Sometimes, our team has to write a wrapper library to call directly to external services' APIs.

- Not easy to hire an Elixir developer in Singapore. Our team tried to hire Ruby on Rails developers and train them. But they were not feeling interesting in learning Elixir, so they left the team.

A couple thoughts after using it for a couple years.

1. It actually takes a while to get your head around the fact that the biggest advantage of elixir is having access to the battle tested features in OTP. It takes longer to realize that these benefits don't come for free and elixir might not be the best solution to your problem.

2. The learning curve for writing functional code is different for different people. As a result, it's impossible to figure out before hand how long it will take a team used to writing pythonic code, for example, to start writing functional, elixir code.

3. You're able to emulate something like type checking between pattern matching and ecto schemas but it's not type checking. Be prepared to spend time coming up with best practices for writing tests.

If you come from the Ruby / Rails world, then you've probably developed some level of skin thickness about my biggest problem with elixir: it's dynamically typed, therefore almost impossible to write right the first x times. (For a value of `x` that's big enough for me.)

Coupled with the relative slowness of the compiler, this means your average development session is a loop of

1. trying to get something that pass syntax check

2. starting your application

3. making a request

4. `no match of right hand side...` because you had a function that expected `{:error {:ok {:foo %{bar: 0}}}` down a five-level-deep stack, and you typed `%{"bar" => 0}`, you fool ! Or maybe you typed "baar". Or maybe you did not type it, and some of your colleague did. How would she know ? `dialixir` was probably disabled a few years ago because the error messages were not helping anyone, and you're not going to write `@spec` anymore at this point.

I heard some people managed to overcome this by using the REPL, but in my experience it just means making the spelling mistakes in a terminal rather than in an editor.

Elixir is great for code that mostly does "routing" of messages from sources to sources.

Phoenix channels are a blasts.

Pattern matching would be great if the compiler could help you with the obvious mistakes.

Libraries are exactly how you would expect for a few-years-old language. Name one topic, and there are three competing libraries : one of them does not work, the other one is unmaintained, the third one has completely changed its API in latest alpha. You're going to pick the wrong one anyway.

If I could go back in time, I'd avoid writing any kind of business logic in it.

(Opinions mine.)

What are the alternatives to Elixir? I'm a proponent of functional/LISPy languages and when it comes to developing web applications, Elixir with Phoenix and Ecto just works extremely well. Maybe the next best would be Clojure since the JVM brings a huge ecosystem with it, but I did a cursory look into it a while ago and the frameworks just didn't seem to be on the same level as Phoenix/Ecto.

The main complaints are valid: hiring issues, lack of a good typesystem, small ecosystem. Yet I have been the most productive with Elixir and would rather move to something better than regress to the mean just because Elixir isn't a mainstream language yet (which would solve the hiring and small ecosystem issues).

> I did a cursory look into [Clojure] a while ago and the frameworks...

Most Clojurists tout "libraries over frameworks", accordingly perhaps with the flexibility of the language itself. Personally, I think acceptance of frameworks would bring much needed standardization to the Clojure experience. On the frontend, I enjoy the lightweight Re-frame.

Clojure has these:

https://coastonclojure.com/

https://fulcro.fulcrologic.com/

http://pedestal.io/

I've found elixir easy to write but a pain to read, especially when it comes other people's code.

Elixir is also dynamic but with annotations that gives the illusion of types. It's really the worst of both worlds.

Recently was involved with an elixir backend being phased out in favor of python because of the following reasons:

* Not enough engineers can write/understand elixir which kept leading to people being blocked

* Library ecosystem for scientific applications is lacking

* The language itself is confusing and the macro capability causes code to be uniquely incomprehensible in each different module

It was a worthwhile experiment but you just can't beat the advantages of having extensive documentation and expertise in the more mainstream languages unless you have very specific performance requirements.

Our Ruby / Rails agency tried implementing a project in Elixir. After 3 weeks we stopped the experiment and re-did everything in Ruby.

What stopped us was not so much the lack of libraries, but programming ergonomics. E.g. when using keyword lists for function options, callers need to pass the keywords in the exact same order. Also mocking was difficult in tests.

Elixir is a great project with a friendly community, it just didn't work for us. YMMV so by all means try it out if you're interested!

> E.g. when using keyword lists for function options, callers need to pass the keywords in the exact same order.

That's not generally true in the language. Were you trying to pattern match options in your own functions? Newbies to the language can get excited about the pattern matching feature and try to apply it in places where it's not right (well I may be projecting there).

> Also mocking was difficult in tests.

This is true. Were you using Mox? Mox makes things considerably easier at the cost of some boilerplate, with the added benefit that you can run concurrent mocks. You also have to not think of mocks in elixir like Ruby, they are very different.

I'm sorry I wish someone more experienced with Elixir could have helped onboard you.

> E.g. when using keyword lists for function options, callers need to pass the keywords in the exact same order.

This would've been fixed by creating a map from the passed in list, which would remove the order dependency but still keep the ergonomics of a keyword list, or just querying the keyword-list with `Keyword.*` functions. Not that big of an issue, to be honest, and not a showstopper. There are much bigger issues with the language, but Ruby doesn't offer any upsides in those cases either.

>when using keyword lists for function options

Proplists should be replaced with maps pretty much everywhere.

>Also mocking was difficult in tests

Interesting, what exactly was difficult? You just replace one function with another.

> Interesting, what exactly was difficult? You just replace one function with another.

I'm not the person you're asking, but iirc, that replacement is global - so once you replace function/module X with MockX, you can't test X itself, nor anything else that relies on X.

This is 100% correct, and a very huge pain point, and why you're supposed to use Mox, which solves that problem (arguably in a more conceptually "correct" fashion than ad-hoc Ruby Mocks). Admittedly there is a very steep learning curve, but it's worth it, because once do it you start to be able to do things you can't do in any other PL (not even erlang).

It's a pity that the elixir community doesn't make this clearer, because I'm seeing "not being able to Mock" be a common complaint.

It probably depends more on where they are coming from. Mox has more overheads for sure than options in Ruby or Javascript. Its more like mocking in Java or C++; where you declare an interface(behaviour), program against that, and then use dependency injection to load the mock or real code at the right time. I'd been working with Elixir for several years when I first tried using Mox and it still took awhile to get my head around it and figure out how to integrate it into our project. I would not be surprised to hear that newer teams really struggle with it.

> I would not be surprised to hear that newer teams really struggle with it.

I completely agree. Not having an expert Elixirist able to help me: It took me a full six months of fooling around with Mox (and a cryptic feature announcement in the 1.8 release) to really dig into and grok it. At this stage in my elixir experience, I have even PR'd a feature that's been integrated into Mox, so it's not completely incomprhensible, it's a super-well-written library.

Honestly, It's a totally (alien/from-the-future)-technology (in both the good and bad senses) library. The bad senses could be almost trivially fixed with an in-depth, free, online video masterclass or, hell, even a conference lecture on it, and blog posts. More people that really know how it works should blog about how amazing Mox is. Unfortunately, I suspect that the people who are using Mox to its fullest extent are too busy pushing code to prod, ha.

>and why you're supposed to use Mox, which solves that problem

I never used that Mox and never had a need to. I just use `Mock` which allows `passthrough` as I stated in another comment, what other clarity is needed I don't understand. Can you give any example of the problem you can not solve instead of pitiness?

You can't run concurrent tests doing direct mock injection in that fashion, because the mock is global. If you use Mox (or similar), your mocks are tied to your test.

Erm, yes this is why you mock it. I still fail to see the problem, here is an example how you mock a function: https://hexdocs.pm/mock/Mock.html

Inside `with_mock` code will only access mocked function. In case you want to call original function in some condition - you have `passthrough` available inside a new function which will call the original one. So what is the problem exactly?

I wrote an Elixir GraphQL-to-multiple-REST-backends proxy two years ago. It used OAuth and ran redundant in a Docker Swarm. Also wrote an Expo+Apollo PoC for the mobile Dev group to start from.

The backends were swagger which allowed me to autogenerate the Elixir source code for the GraphQL resolvers from the swagger.json file. It was a project for a telecom company which also employed Erlang programmers.

My experience: stability was outstanding, performance reasonable. Got a lot of praise for it. Only got one big report in two years.

Would I recommend it? Only to experienced software engineers.

Would I recommend it to companies? Only if you understand that every new tool or stack is a strategic decision.

We've been using Elixir for our API server from the start. It's a great language and scales really well. We needed to add a websocket API at some point, and now it's our channel with most throughput. Phoenix handles it fine, and we're still able to triple the throughput comfortably.

The one thing that we struggled with Elixir with is that it's quite hard to find people that know Elixir. For a long time I was the only one doing Elixir in the company, which introduced a bottleneck. That said, when you find someone who knows Elixir they tend to know Elixir (and a bit of infra) quite well.

I tried implementing an algorithm for tracking multiple objects based on graph-cuts using Elixir. I was disappointed in the lack of strict typing in the language, since this is one of the things that made me want to try functional programming.

In order to tell the type of various method signatures, it seems like you have to go looking at other areas of your program. I’m aware that it’s possible to annotate method signatures, but this still didn’t lead me to feel secure. I think I was hoping for/expecting something more Haskell-like.

To be fair, dynamic typing is a well-promoted feature of the language. The first sentence on the Elixir homepage starts "Elixir is a dynamic, functional language"...

Why would you "try to implement" stuff in a language that is clearly dynamically typed and then be disappointed about lack of types? It's like trying Python and being disappointed about it lacking types. Do you often try languages without even googling for a basic description and then are disappointed because it's not like other programming language or what you expected?

Hah, well I was focused on the benefits of functional programming rather than the dynamic aspect of the language.

It’s easier to recognize that a feature (dynamic typing) is an issue in some applications after trying it for a while rather than just taking a theoretical view. I’ve sometimes misunderstood how a feature works in practice by relying too much on my theoretical understanding.

Also, because Elixir allows type annotations, I was thinking that I might not need static typing. It turned out (at least for me) that I would prefer to have a language that insists on type annotations by default rather than allowing them as options.

I really enjoy Elixir. I've used for a fun side project. It's an awesome language with some really interesting concepts.

However, I wouldn't use it for a real project:

1. The ecosystem doesn't compare to ruby/python/javascript. There's a lot of missing packages and abandoned libraries. I ended up having patch a bunch of libraries I used.

2. The tooling that exists is nice and 'just works' but there's a lot that's missing from ruby land: https://elixirforum.com/t/help-an-elixir-beginner-find-missi...

3. The deployment story is horrible. The heroku/dokku buildpacks didn't work by default and it's not obvious how you can easily deploy a mix/distillery release without writing your own deploy scripts. https://elixirforum.com/t/official-heroku-dokku-buildpack/28...

4. Phoenix != Rails. There's many many obvious things that are missing. `mail_to` for example.

I've spent some time learning it that I don't regret.

However, I dislike the GenServer syntax, it feels too complicated with random tuples all over the place. Also, I feel like the job market is too small. I wasn't able to find a job using it (although maybe COVID is to blame here).

I've done a fair bit of both Ruby and Elixir. My impression is that Elixir leaves a lot of the legacy cruft behind, and it has a much smaller language feature set (which is IMO big bonus). The language is pretty easy to grasp quickly as a result. There isn't much in the way of quirky syntax or backward compatibility weirdness.

Probably the biggest advantage of Elixir over Ruby is the runtime. The Erlang VM has proper concurrency, and it provides really nice primitives for working with it.

The ways in which Elixir sucks tend to be the same as Ruby: dynamic types, somewhat slow runtime (compared to C, Java, Rust, Go, etc). I'd also add that library support is still a bit weak with Elixir, but it's always getting better.

>somewhat slow runtime (compared to C, Java, Rust, Go, etc).

It's only slow if you are comparing a single-threaded operations, Erlang VM is designed to scale horizontally, not to be fast with one thread.

Elixir and Go both have similar performance (although Elixir tends to use a lot more CPU). Here's a pretty good blog post comparing Go, Node and Elixir: https://stressgrid.com/blog/benchmarking_go_vs_node_vs_elixi...

I hope I'm missing something here because that's an absolutely awful benchmark. Neither Go nor Elixir were stressed enough to start revealing failure symptoms, so Go could still destroy Elixir by 10x for all we know. Then Node was run single-threaded even though the test instances had 8 or 36 vCPUs.

But some people will still walk away thinking that Go and Elixir perform about the same while Node is 4x slower.

Eh. This blog post runs a single node process on a 36-core CPU. I'm not a fan of node but that's hardly a meaningful benchmark

How close does it come to matching the Ruby/rails gem ecosystem?

Phoenix is the closest, and while it's not exactly a Rails clone, it provides most of what you need to get started. It's similar to Rails in that there's a CLI to generate code, and frameworks for unit testing, DB modeling, templating, etc.

Where Phoenix really shines is its support for fancy stuff like Websockets and distributed messaging in your backend. Trying to do these things in Rails leaves much to be desired.

I mean more stuff like Devise for authentication, Apartment for multitenancy, ancestry for hierarchical data, etc. Seems like every common problem has a gem that solves it. Does Elixir/Phoenix have equivalents?

Triplex / Apartment Coherence / Devise ExAdmin / ActiveAdmin

Are they as good as the Rails equivalent?

IMO

+ Phoenix _better_ than Rails, which is very surprising

- less packages available, though almost everything covered by at least one package. ( hex.pm vs rubygems.org )

I've spent roughly 3-4 years working experience on Django + Python in total. I've switched to Elixir / Phoenix since 2 years ago. I can say, the two biggest cons (despite is many cons) is the packages maturity and doing heavy lifting processing.

The first one, I can't complaint. Every programming language have it's weakness, to solve that I'm offload processing stuff into Rust. Luckily, Elixir have NIF integration with Rust.

One counter point to elixir is that there's a significant learning wall to onboard new developers, more so than simpler a language like Go or Python.

To me learning Elixir felt like a two stage process: learning the language and learning the OTP.

The language itself is pretty small and I felt like the first stage was pretty easy.

Learning the OTP is a much bigger challenge.

At the same time, I think you can gain a lot of the benefits of Elixir and the BEAM without needing to be an OTP expert, because frameworks like Phoenix leverage it for you.

In my experience, things like pattern matching and immutable data really contribute to a more maintainable code base, whether you find you need the actor model or not.

Very much agree. With the exception of macros, part 1 learning the language was a joy. It was fairly easy and I loved it.

Part 2 learning Phoenix and OTP has been a long, ongoing thing. If I did it full time it would be done, but doing it off and on part time it is a long slog.

I'm not a genius, but I found the opposite to be true. Go and Python seem non-intuitive to me, whereas Elixir felt natural and easy to grok.

I feel there are dimensions to "ease" and Go and Elixir went different directions on them. Go is very "simple" in that you can look at it and generally easily understand what it's doing.

Elixir and its ilk tends to make it easy to do what you want to do.

In Go you have to re-write things over and over because the abstractions are low, but they're easy to do. In Elixir you can use the built in libs/abstractions, but you have have no idea how they work.

This is a gross simplification of both sides of course, but I often see Go-people arguing a different point than their counterpoint in <other language> is trying to make.

Go is a language that always felt painfully obtuse to me. It always seemed hard to do basic things. To be fair I've only used it begrudgingly and never on my own work. The only thing I ever enjoyed about Go was the fast compilation.

I agree and dislike the language immensely. Some colleagues of mine like it for the runtime and compile time, which I guess is fine, but my beef with them is that they mistake motion for action.

They consider themselves "productive" because in go "...the code just flies from my fingers...", when what they're doing is reimplementing the same things over and over because the language doesn't support it.

HAVING to type a lot of stuff, even if it's easy to type, isn't productive. It's just a lot of typing.

Because of it's magic.

Debugging it it a nightmare especially when you have to roll up your sleeves and go into Erlang.

This is not my experience. Just yesterday I had to debug an error in staging that had cropped up because erlang had changed its public API for ssh_file in OTP/23. Despite being three private libraries down (and in an obscure option, and being not well documented) I had the bug identified in 30 minutes and the patch rolled out on all three library levels in another hour.

The biggest help was IO.inspect, and then the next biggest was elixir_ls, which had used typespec analysis and highlighted the error for me in my ide.

As one of the contributors to ElixirLS this makes me happy :)

Maybe, but that's hasn't been my experience. The Erlang monitoring/debugging tools that you get out of the box are pretty good.

I rarely find that I have to "go into Erlang" but it is true that Erlang error messages can be a bit obtuse initially.

An extra point is that finding Elixir developers (or people who are willing to learn it) is also much harder.

I have heard this quite a bit, and it very well may be true, but it has not been my experience. I worked in a rails shop and there are tons of people that want to learn and work with elixir, but there are no jobs they can find. Likewise on Elixir forums and slack, there are lots of people looking for Elixir work, but not many people hiring for it.

I think within the rails community there's enough people that want to give elixir and phoenix a try but if you're not using phoenix the application pool drastically shrinks.

it was huge mistake for us, it was chosen for the wrong reason, to solve a non-problem, complicated everything without adding any value.

* cant find people for it and if you do they come because of the tech not because of the real world problems we are trying to solve.

* the no types thing makes people write tests that test for typos and make refactoring incredibly difficult because you have to fix gazillion pattern matching tests

* the tooling is just horrible, cant jump, because of pattern matching that makes it much more annoying

* phoenix was complete misfit for us as well, so i ended up hating it for no reason

so because of no-tooling and on-refactoring, accidental complexity only grows, and we ended up with much more fragile system with infinite failure domain.

i wrote briefly about why it was chosen at https://eng.rekki.com/kitchen/kitchen.txt and why we moved to go.

that being said, i am sad that this was my first real world experience with elixir, in a project where it was not a good fit, so now i am totally biased against it. when i tried it briefly for few hobby projects it seemed like a quite cool language.

-b

A language is a tool. You are right with your analysis about the 3rd party libraries, it will absolutely slow you down.

Elixir is an okay language at best, if you look at it in comparison with let's say Python:

1. It is not any safer than python 2. Not any faster than python 3. Abstracts away a lot of things away from you "magically" just like python 4. It is harder to read elixir cause you will have people writing all sorts of random macros.

Where Elixir is good: 1. Concurrency (Processes!) 2. Based on BEAM but you won't care for your simple API project and you shouldn't have to. 3. Other erlang goodness supervisors, otp etc.

Personally I detest Python, but you would be better off writing your app in Python cause using Elixir you have gained nothing much substantially but lost on all ecosystem and community support Python has gained in its long history.

As a sidenote, I hope you use a strongly typed language.

I've seen places regret Elixir, usually the following issues cause the biggest regret:

1. Hiring. Generally speaking, finding experienced Elixir engineers is not cheap nor easy. Also, chances of finding someone willing to work in an office is even more slim (very remote heavy talent pool)...

2. Deployment/monitoring. Shipping your first Elixir application to production will likely be one giant act of frustration if you're used to Ruby or other scripting languages. Compile time vs runtime settings and environment variables are a HUGE gotcha. Also, as fate would have it, BEAM is more like an operating system than a simple runtime and thinking you can toss it into container and be off to the races is a recipe for disaster. Hope you didn't want to use distributed Erlang... (though this has gotten better recently, tbh). A lot of common monitoring tools and methodologies have to be thrown out the window because of how BEAM works internally (there are great ones to accomplish most anything, but its just more to learn).

3. Distributed systems, make for distributed problems. Yes, Erlang/Elixir and BEAM give you some fucking amazing tools to build distributed systems... that doesn't make building distributed systems themselves "easy" or "quick."

4. Performance. Erlang/Elixir will probably take a hot-fast shit on most scripting languages when it comes to network requests; however, if you need to do any long-running number crunching or complex string manipulation, you'd be better off almost anywhere else. This could also be categorized as "use the right tool for the job, dummy."

5. Learning curve is real and vastly underestimated. You aren't just learning a language, you're sort of embarking on a quest to learn a new paradigm. Erlang/Elixir, BEAM, and OTP (I'm going to refer to them as the "Triforce") were designed together to solve a specific set of problems. The Triforce has been in-use, 24/7, 365 days a year, for 30 years, in real, critical, production systems. If you ever wanted to learn the "Actor" pattern, BEAM is the most metal implementation I know of... Also, really sit down and make sure you understand it's all "non-blocking" thanks to the scheduler being able to pre-empt processes.

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With regards to 3rd party libraries, I find in Elixir and Erlang, I need and use way less of them... BEAM and OTP give you soooooooo much it's kind of absurd how little you end up missing or wanting.

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Lastly, while a lot of the success stories here are great to read, a lot of them have bad code, or things that are just silly to the trained eye. And that's totally okay, the authors are learning, we all have do it, but I'd probably not recommend the code as study material. In general, try and find examples from people who have seem to have been using it for a few years.

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Addendum (via edit):

FWIW, I've been writing Elixir for about six years now (just checked some commits), and have been employed full-time writing Elixir for five of those. I wrote Ruby before that, and have never looked back... If you want my number one selling point to any Rubyist :trollface: (but also very real), is in Elixir a "horrible, slow, wretched monolithic test suite" still will take less than 90 seconds to run.

I would recommend Erlang over Elixir. Rubyish syntax and leak of Erlang abstraction is a tough combo.

I have been using Elixir for about a year and the only problems I have found is the much smaller ecosystem. It's still a niche language. This means you may be the first one to encounter some problems although I have found the community quite helpful. Even if the number of libraries cannot really stack up to Rails the few libraries tend to be high quality. Overall, I find things more explicit and understandable. There's a lot less magic and I find functional code easier to reason about. At the end of the day, every popular language was niche at one time but some people took a chance on it. Maybe Elixir hasn't yet gone mainstream but its a fairly healthy ecosystem with many brilliant, passionate people.

I don’t, I’ve being pushing everywhere I go to use it.

The main question is always the same, “how much effort it will take me to find Febe if I need them”.

And my answer is always the same, “make them come and work with you, and focus people excited and open to learn a new technology”.

I think a big question is how much you like functional programming, afaik you're not in OOP land anymore with Elixir. That's a very big mind shift and might be a bigger consideration than even community size or ecosystem.

I love Elixir, but I found the learning curve to be very steep for non-web use cases. It's just different than anything else, and other than syntax, I'd argue it nothing like Ruby.

You might also ask 'Who regrets not choosing Elixir'.

I really like Elixir and want it to be even more popular than it is but...

My only real complaint with Elixir (and this covers Phoenix and Live View too) is that things tend to get announced WAY before they're anywhere near being production ready, so you may find yourself postponing building anything because you're waiting for the announced thing to be ready to use.

For example Live View was talked about in the later months of 2018 but there's still some things missing today that make it pretty sketchy to really use it in a non-trivial production app, and the docs leave much to be desired. Things like LV based file uploads as being part of the library was in the "near future" or "on the horizon" a year ago, etc..

I only spent a weekend using it for a project to play with about 6 weeks ago and ended up uncovering some bugs and even some feature requests that quickly ended up making its way into the master branch of LV after reporting them. But these are for things that seemed very basic to me in the sense that if the folks who were developing it were using it in larger production apps, there's no way those things wouldn't have made it into the library sooner.

In other words, I don't feel comfortable or confident at all to use it in production because I'm afraid if I spend some real time working with it, I'm going to end up being patient zero for so many bugs and edge cases. I want to focus on building my apps and trust the libraries I use, not be a pioneer (software is already difficult enough without bugs!).

On the flip side, Rails is a champion here and IMO it's very much why it's so popular and will remain popular 5 or even 10 years from now. It's because most of the things in Rails come from tech focused businesses using it to drive their services and the core team also use it to drive their business. Everything feels like it's really battle hardened, production ready when features are talked about and was carefully designed based on months of real world usage.

With Elixir, Phoenix and LV that feeling isn't there -- at least not to me. It sort of kind of feels like the libraries are being built from a theoretical point of view. I mean, I know the creators of those libraries do consulting work, but it's super behind closed doors. There's never any talk about what drives the development of practical features and it's kind of a bummer to get glimpses of things on the horizon, but then years later they aren't ready for production.

That's the thing that worries me about the future of the ecosystem. I also think it's partly why it hasn't exploded in popularity. It's a nice ecosystem for sure, but it's missing critical components for it to be adopted by the masses.

That and I think generally speaking the language is very hard to pick up. I know I struggle hard with Elixir with ~20 years of general dev experience across half a dozen non-functional languages before touching Elixir. I still feel like I have trouble reading Elixir code I've written 2 months ago when it uses some "real" functional bits that I had to ask for help on.

I often feel like I hit 100% dead ends and have to ask another human for help. I don't think I would be using the language if it wasn't for the IRC / Slack channels. There's some folks going above and beyond to help people out there, including Jose himself (the creator of Elixir).

With Python and Ruby I rarely encounter situations where I had to ask for help like this. Google always had the answer for everything I couldn't figure out based on tinkering and reading the docs.

It's not just due to less blog posts existing for Elixir / Phoenix too. It's the language overall. I want to love it, but for whatever reason my brain won't accept it naturally. I get hung up so frequently. I know this is just my brain being an idiot, but I do wonder if anyone else feels the same.

My gut tells me yes because otherwise the language would already be one of the most popular choices for building web apps. There's a lot of great things surrounding the language.

1. IEx.Pry, if you are used to ruby's pry. Pipe states are extremely easy to inspect:

    abc
    |> foo()
    |> bar()

to

    abc |> IO.inspect(label: "a")
    |> foo() |> IO.inspect(label: "b")
    |> bar() |> IO.inspect(label: "c")

If you use vscode, this user snippet will inject this (with line numbers as labels) when you type "ins <tab>", which can be used to great effect with multiline cursors. Since line numbers are usually the same length in any given block of code, it's equally easy to ninja those IO.inspects out with the delete key. https://gist.github.com/ityonemo/00875891748bed3ee68e5f1b75c...

2- agreed

3- Mix releases have solved 80% of this problem, for me. Since it's trivially extensible, I do a series of compile-time checks, include verifying that the current branch is on master and correctly git-tagged; and then uploading to Amazon S3. I haven't done this yet, but it's going to eventually trigger an automated blue-green deploy.

Oh. Dropping IO.inspect into the pipeline is embarrassingly obvious! I can't believe I didn't think to do that. I always used IO.inspect as a pretty printer during development but I guess I didn't think it would return/pass through its input. Thanks for pointing that out.

I clearly hadn't bothered to read the 'Getting Started - Debugging' page on the Elixir website at any point.

Oh man I'm so sorry. The difference between using io.inspect like this and not is a the difference between "huge pain, worst ever" and "best concurrent debugging feature ever". IO in erlang is atomic, so in concurrent systems IO output will never be interrupted by IO output from another thread, which is not generally true in other systems (c, c++, rust, go). It makes a HUGE difference.

> You can’t throw a REPL wherever your want in your code

In my experience, I found I could throw a `require IEx; IEx.pry` pretty much anywhere in the code to get a REPL. This seemed like a unique superpower of Elixir to me. Where have you found that this isn't possible?

I agree with the pipe states point.

My main complaint with Elixir is that I'd discover really stupid mistakes with run time errors. The sort of things a bunch of other languages I've used would preclude at compile time. I never dug into more advanced debugging or Dialyzer though.

dialyzer is terrible, but vscode/elixir_ls + dialyzer is quite frankly amazing.

How is serving static files super hacky? We're serving assets and custom uploads from Phoenix and it took me about 10 seconds to set it up (just change the Plug.Static configuration)

I've used Elixir since 2015 and I find Elixir to be unusable for any kind of intelligent domain modelling, but that's primarily because it's dynamically typed and has no concept of real sum types, etc., not necessarily because it's any worse at this than Ruby.

Any codebase beyond fairly small will be harder and harder to work with to an unreasonable degree, in my experience, and any perceived "velocity" gained from the dynamic nature of it is paid for doubly so by the lack of safety you get beyond toy projects.

I'm only slightly more for Erlang as a choice mostly because it's simpler than Elixir and doesn't have as much obfuscation of logic added to it that Elixir does, but in reality it's also a bad choice for any bigger system. The runtime is absolutely great, but the languages on it are generally not good enough.

I'm a bit confused by this comment. Having used both Ruby and Elixir (more Ruby) both languages have type systems which are quite capable of modeling domains[1]. They lack static type checking, but I find that a thorough test suite catches most type errors anyway. And while creating a thorough test suite is costly, static types in most languages[2] don't reduce this burden much: there isn't an alternative to thorough testing.

[1] This looks fine to me? https://elixir-lang.org/getting-started/typespecs-and-behavi...

[2] I have limited experience with Haskell, but my impression is that the type capabilities do actually allow you to forego testing in a lot of cases. The next best static type system I've used is C#'s, which I used professionally for years, and in C# I think automated testing is still very necessary.

EDIT: I regret even talking about type checking here--that's not my point. My point is that for modeling domains, Elixir's type system is totally adequate. I'll agree that Elixir's type checking could be better, but that's not what the comment I was responding to said.

When people refer to "typing", it is almost certainly reasonable to assume they are referring to static typing, as implemented by most languages. I don't think this should be confusing.

Specs/contracts are cool but ultimately don't afford the same kind of descriptive and expressive power that a static type system does.

> static types in most languages[2] don't reduce this burden much: there isn't an alternative to thorough testing.

However, there definitely is a burden about how much testing you have to write. I generally don't want to have to test every branch of my program to make sure a string doesn't slip through where an int should be or that variables are initialized and not null, etc.

I see that language parroted all the time - "With thorough enough testing a dynamic language shouldn't be a problem", and I have never understood it. Arguing to build what is essentially a build-time type checker in the form of automated tests seems twice as cumbersome for half the benefit. Instead of building tests that check each branch of a program's types, why not use a language that forbids dynamic typing? You should still have tests, but IMO tests that are just checking that a string is a string are A.) Time consuming, and B.) largely useless beyond type validation.

Not GP, but I have done plenty of TDD development in dynamic languages and not once have I written a test that checks whether a string is a string. You get that implicitly because others test will fail if the types don't match.

While I personally prefer certain statically typed languages over dynamic ones for new projects, In practice, for small to medium sized projects, runtime type errors is in my opinion much less of an issue as some people make it out to be. Except for null exceptions they rarely make it into production and if, are easy to track down and fix.

Interestingly, a lot of the people I have seen constantly running into type problems in say Python, are the ones coming from statically typed languages that keep insisting doing thing the way they are used to instead of embracing the duck.

> I see that language parroted all the time - "With thorough enough testing a dynamic language shouldn't be a problem", and I have never understood it.

"If you drive carefully enough, a car without seatbelts shouldn't be a problem!"

Exactly

Analogies are a great way to explain things, but not so much a great way to prove things.

If you're writing software that's life and death critical like wearing a seatbelt, you should absolutely be using a strong, statically typed language, because catching errors at runtime is completely unacceptable. But incidentally, none of the proponents of static types on this thread have talked about any languages that I would actually use for this situation. Java or C-family languages certainly aren't strongly typed enough. Type systems aren't a magic bullet.

But in the vast majority of modern software, it mostly just matters that you catch and fix bugs quickly--whether you catch those bugs at compile time or runtime is usually not as critical.

> Analogies are a great way to explain things, but not so much a great way to prove things.

What are we proponents of static types being asked to prove?

> But in the vast majority of modern software, it mostly just matters that you catch and fix bugs quickly--whether you catch those bugs at compile time or runtime is usually not as critical.

I would argue that catching bugs at compile time, before you ship them, is vastly preferable to catching them at run time.