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Comment by triplejjj | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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