Comment by nickjj | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nickjj | Hacker News Reader

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I see it more like asking questions, offering suggestions and potentially trying to improve the language and eco-system by offering feedback and sometimes even pointing out things that hang me up.

For example, the other day someone asked if Phoenix could ever support similar features of Rails such as having something similar to Rails Application Templates. I thought it was a great idea and it was something I wanted too, so I gave as much feedback as I could around why it might be useful to have.

In the end, it looks like most people don't want such generators, or having an ability to build a community around templates like Rails, Laravel and Python. That's based on only a few people commenting to say it's not a good idea and pretty no one else replying saying they wanted it.

You might see that as complaining but I see that as trying to fight for a really useful feature that will help grow the community and make it easier for folks to build applications in the end.

If I didn't care I would have left the Elixir community long ago. I have way better things to do than troll forums. The project I was gung-ho about developing in Phoenix is no longer using Phoenix because after all of those forum posts and struggling endlessly with Elixir I came to the conclusion it isn't the right technology for me to build web apps in. I continue to sometimes post because I hope one day things will change and I'll try to pick it back up again when the community and eco-system is more mature (from a library selection POV, not personal maturity).

The issue is that there is a gap and if you won’t learn the language nor use it, the gap won’t ever be closed.

For example, you said elsewhere a solution was complicated because it used io lists and a binary constructor but both concepts are explained in Elixir’s official getting started guide. So sometimes it feels you are saying things are complex while you don’t seem to be actively learning the language and some will definitely find that frustrating.

It would be the same if I went to Rust forums, a language I haven’t yet studied in any depth but read a lot about, and constantly said the ownership mechanism is complicated.

Apologies if this comes up as rude. You do seem to be a person open to feedback, so I thought I would drop my $.02.

Thanks.

It's not so much an unwillingness to learn.

It's not being able to write what I think is intuitive code and let's be real now. Programming is all about using tools that make you happy and productive. That's why there's so many different viable choices.

For me, personally (opinion of course), I don't want to have to worry about using binary constructors or io lists instead of strings every time I want to work with a string. I just want to use strings. Fortunately other languages can work with strings efficiently so I don't need to concern myself about such optimizations. I can just focus on the business problem at hand.

When stuff like this happens all the time, yeah, it gets frustrating and eventually you decide a tool isn't right for you. I think I gave it a fair shake too. I wrote a pretty big app twice in Phoenix, once with and once without Live View. I even delayed shipping my product for over a year waiting for Live View to get more fleshed out. And even then it felt like I was pioneering things because I kept running into severe bugs (which I reported).

The lack of libraries is kind of the straw the breaks the camel's back. I can maybe get beyond some of the language issues if it lets me be super productive but I found myself having to implement so many libraries myself because there's no official libraries available for Stripe, AWS, etc.. It just lead to feeling like I was spending more time writing libraries than developing my own app.

In time I hope the Elixir compiler could be smart enough to make optimizations for you behind the scenes and maybe there will be more libraries in the future too. In time Live View will get more fleshed out and polished as well, which is always welcome.

I am well aware you know this but Elixir is a different paradigm than Ruby and Python. Approaching it like you could do everything as in Ruby or Python means you are unwilling to learn the functional aspects of the language.

IO lists have useful properties that are not readily available in Ruby and Python, so they come with benefits, and Phoenix uses them to great extent for fast templates.

Binary constructors aren’t optimizations either but the way to construct binaries and strings in Elixir. They’re as fundamental as pattern matching.

The lack of libraries is something I can identify with but please understand it is frustrating to hear over and over again something is hard in Elixir while refusing to learn the language basic concepts because you would rather do it as in Python or in Ruby.

>You might see that as complaining but I see that as trying to fight for a really useful feature that will help grow the community and make it easier for folks to build applications in the end.

The change in mindset you're demanding from the devs is impossible to accomplish through comments I think. You'd need to develop personal real world relationships with the devs to be able to have such an impact, or create pathways for people with this mindset into the community.

It's the mindset of DHH or Taylor Ottwell what makes their product oriented frameworks more product oriented. Core devs and core parts of the community having this mindset is necessary as a fruitful foundation for more product oriented feature requests I think.

> It's the mindset of DHH or Taylor Ottwell what makes their product oriented frameworks more product oriented.

Yeah I totally 100% agree with this. I think it's very much so why Rails and Laravel won't be going anywhere anytime soon. As it turns out most people who are into web development are trying to build products and services.

But I will say that every time I've talked to Jose or Chris (I don't know them personally, I just mean in chat), they always say the best way to offer suggestions or feedback about the language or framework is to post on the forums. It's just unfortunate the community is so against feature requests or open to talking about things.

It just feels like the forums have the same regulars shooting down ideas from anyone new, or feature request threads get little to no replies.

>It's just unfortunate the community is so against feature requests or open to talking about things.

I don't have that impression, but I also got into Elixir knowing that it's not as product focused and more hands on.

For me it was more important that I don't hate the language and programming paradigm I'm mainly using. For purely business oriented stuff or quick MVPs I can still use no-code tools, which in 2020 is really the way to go if you're solo or a very small team.

>It just feels like the forums have the same regulars shooting down ideas from anyone new, or feature request threads get little to no replies.

Most on the Elixir forums seem to be employees and hardcore programmers, not founders and business people. I think even the main devs are employed, this changes how you think about prototyping features or tiem savings if you're never really in that situation and work fixed hours.

I think that the forums are a great learning resource and people seem nice, I mean you can't say that they aren't pacient with you.

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