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Comment by everdev | Hacker News Reader

> Elixir has been mostly selling itself: it works, it sits on a rock-solid platform, code is very understandable as the community has a healthy aversion towards the sort of “magic” that makes Rails tick, and it’s quite simple to pick up as it has a small surface area

I was a huge Rails fan back in '07 and built a number of apps with it successfully, but I can't help feel like it's transition to a legacy framework has already begun.

While Rails was never top in the performance category, languages are catching up in tooling and readability. So, now you can get performance and a great developer experience with multiple other languages like Elixir, Crystal, Go and more.

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I tend to agree. I love rails and have written a lot of apps in it. I'm newer to phoenix but I'm feeling much like I did early on in rails. Between Elixir/Phoenix and Crystal/Amber, I think rails is headed towards legacy as well. I'm not writing any new apps in rails. The good news at least, being condemned to a "legacy" rails app should still be fairly pleasant :-)

I strongly disagree. I wouldn't call Rails legacy, but _mature_. And the recent adoption of Webpack(er) certainly brings new life to the framework, allowing me to write ES6 JS with a lot of convention over configuration.

I love starting new projects in Rails, and don't feel the need to look anywhere else: it handles everything for me in a very nice and battle tested way, and I'm always one Google / StackOverflow question away from finding out exactly how to achieve my goals quickly.

How can you compare the overall developer experience of Crystal, which isn't even 1.0 yet and has very few libraries, with the mature ecosystem of Rails?

Not OP, and not Crystal, but comparing Phoenix ecosystem with Rails is pretty doable. There are a lot of packages available. Obviously not as much as on rubygems, but one can get a pretty good feel for the overall developer experience. My enjoyment of rails isn't really about the wide array of gems available anyway. It's the paradigms and community standards.

Rails is also very powerful because of hundreds of thousands of answers on Stackoverflow and countless blogs. It's not easy to reach that level.

Another reason why JavaScript is unfortunately so popular.

You're right that the major downside I can see is the ecosystem is not as big. But when I jumped into Rails over a decade ago, the Ruby/Rails ecosystem was not huge yet either.

But, static typing and being able to compile and deploy a binary is a pretty sweet developer experience. And the syntax is nearly identical to Ruby with a few nice additions. Many companies like ThoughtBot (a huge Ruby adopter) are jumping into Crystal. The future is definitely in compiled/static languages IMO.

If you mean your future, you could certainly be right. But if you mean the future of all programming I would like to say that compiled/static languages are in fact the past.

They are super useful and given a complicated enough problem/ sophisticated enough programmer they will look like a good enough solution for all problems. But ... Wordpress

Why are they a thing of the past?

Because in the past they dominated everything. This will not happen again. For some problems/people the ease of dynamic languages are simply more important than the correctness/speed issues you deem as paramount.

I don’t mean no one will or should use static languages but believing they will once again dominate like in the 80s and 90s is an illusion imo

If only there were types in Elixir to get rid of those damn nulls...

Supposedly someone is making a Typescript-like precompiler for Elixir (with ML syntax of course). We are all hoping it succeeds!

Eh, as far as I know I'm the only one doing that, and even then only as an experiment/playground, and I don't have the time to work on it lately (have to pay the bills after all).

It's not compiling to elixir, but the `alpaca` language compiles to the BEAM (via erlang core I think) so it gets you close, although they are not black boxing messages sadly.

If you know of someone else doing typing experiments on top of elixir, please link me (my playground code is on my github repo somewhere)!!!

Found it https://github.com/wende/elchemy

The idea seems just like Typescript, a very interesting project!

Oh yes! Elchemy! How'd I forget about that one (I keep pushing it around!)! ^.^;

It is based on Elm so it has a severely limited type system but it is the most complete on Elixir so far. :-)

This is probably my only gripe with it. I really like static types, since the tools can be so much better in that case. VSCode + ElixirLS is ok, but far from Elm, Typescript or C# in that regard. I've been trying out Dialyzer and Credo, but it all seems so clunky to use.

If you haven't seen the new Dialyzer messages in Dialyxir, I just finished a big effort to improve those messages dramatically for Elixir consumption. Release is in RC currently.

Thanks a ton for your work!

This. If I was a CTO I would never ever choose Crystal, or Elixir, or Kotlin. Give me a proven, "old", battled tested framework with tons of resources that's easy to teach, learn and get sh done with. I'd choose PHP over Elixir for a new business.

I can't tell if you're trolling here or you geniunely don't realize that the foundation of Elixir is older than PHP.

I get the idea behind your comment, but without context it's pretty stupid. There are plenty of use cases where Elixir might be a much better choice than PHP, but it depends entirely on what you're trying to do. I sincerely hope you're not a CTO of a company where PHP is not the right approach...

(that said, I do agree that often PHP is a fine choice, and people might overcomplicate things needlessly by choosing something else)

Disagree as well. How is Rails legacy? It's probably being developed by more people than ever before. Just because it hasn't completely overhauled it's architecture doesn't make it legacy. What will stop you from calling Pheonix legacy in 8 years? There will be at least 2-3 new frameworks/languages that are cooler by then.

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