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Comment by mmartinson | Hacker News Reader

I'd be curious to see if this becomes viable as an interface wrapper for teams that writing new services in Elixir while supporting important pieces of legacy Ruby code. This seems to be the situation in a lot of Ruby shops, and it would be fantastic to see someone getting this working at a big scale and seeing some industry best practices emerge.

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I am not sure why we need to replace Ruby with Elixir. Nor do I understand why it is necessary to write every new code in Elixir. I mean when Crystal gets production ready are you guys going to rewrite everything from Elixir to Crystal ? :-| Elixir is not a substitute for Ruby. It's completely different paradigm and language. Same for Crystal. They just happen to feel like Ruby but are missing a lot from Ruby/Rails ecosystem.

I really like lispness of Ruby and the rails ecosystem. For a lot of things it's still numero uno technology.

The first things that come to mind:

- true parallelism (this is why we need guilds in Ruby 3)

- the BEAM

- functional yet OO at a higher level [0]

- all the Erlang/OTP goodies for free

- Phoenix/Ecto are quite nice frameworks and solid alternatives to the server-side JS world

- “looks” like Ruby though is an entirely different beast

Crystal on the other hand looks more like a Rust alternative to implement almost-as-C-fast Ruby gems. I'm sure it can evolve into an ecosystem but since it's quite far from being stable it will take some time, time in which the Elixir ecosystem will grow because its Erlang foundation already fixed the big issues.

[0] - https://www.infoq.com/interviews/johnson-armstrong-oop

Yeah, in the most recent Who Is Hiring post, every mention of Elixir also mentioned Ruby somewhere, usually in the context you described.

Most of those postings seem like Ruby shops that have pipe dreams of doing Elixir stuff, some day. I'm skeptical many will get there, which is a shame because Elixir is the most fun I've had writing software.

We started in Ruby and have moved to Elixir (not a pipe dream!). If you have an SOA already, adding Elixir isn't a big hurdle. Experienced engineers can pick it up super quickly.

I agree it is incredibly fun! All of the hard work put into BEAM plus the easy-of-use of Ruby and the joys of functional programming make for a wonderful developer experience.

Ya I've actually seen a number a few shops making real moves in that direction, at least here in Vancouver. The OSS ecosystem is obviously pretty immature but I think it's getting good enough that it's starting to seem like a pretty viable option.

Indeed, it seems Elixir is one part complementary to Ruby and the other a great replacement whilst also keeping the main tenets of Ruby in-place.

The only issue so far is that the libraries ecosystem is indeed quite young but that is natural.

Still, Ruby (even without Rails) is at the moment a more productive environment.

I really hope Ruby "3x3" [0] will be released soon enough and projects like Hanami [1] become production ready so that it can coexist in a complementary way rather than becoming replaceable.

[0] - https://blog.heroku.com/ruby-3-by-3

[1] - http://hanamirb.org

Anecdotal, I know, but I work for one of these companies. Definitely not a pipe dream for us. Most new projects are still in Ruby, but Elixir is now supported company-wide, and there's a number of projects being built in Elixir.

I work at a healthcare company, where our primary language had been Ruby. All of our new development, except 1 off scripts, is in Elixir.

Same here all across the board: healthcare, previously Ruby, everything new is in Elixir.

How did the migration go if I may ask? Was it progressive or clean slate? i.e. develop in parallel the new Elixir implementation and just switch when everything is green and all the specs match the Ruby app.

For us, we just do new parts and projects in Elixir.

It's going well! Most of the team is eager to learn something new. The developer ergonomics in Elixir/Phoenix are quite a bit better than Ruby/Rails, which is really saying something because Ruby/Rails has been really great to us!

We're starting new projects in Elixir. We haven't ported anything from Ruby to Elixir yet, but we have a 9 year old ~100k lines of code (not counting views/tests) Rails app that we could make an argument to extract some functionality from.

Awesome to hear. If you're ever interested in chatting about elixir in healthcare, shoot me an email. Mine is in my profile.

Anecdata/shameless plug: Appcues is an Elixir shop with no Ruby at all. And we're hiring!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13080548

I liked you more when you were a role model for Ruby snobbery. :( (Said, like, 95% in jest. I think. I think I think?)

But, yeah, I don't often stump for people around here but Pete is good people to work with if you're looking. I would rather have fire ants poured in my pants than do web work, but I'd jump at the opportunity to work with him again and if you're looking, you could do a lot worse.

I can only speak to what we do at Bleacher Report, but we were mostly Ruby - now Ruby is mostly legacy apps.

Elixir for the services and Node for the client/frontend is how we're rolling now. I don't think any of the Ruby guys want to go back.

While we're not against Ruby - and as I said, we still use it - at our scale Elixir is much more performant & scales better.

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