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Comment by AlchemistCamp | Hacker News Reader

> I started looking into the Elixir/Phoenix world just for LiveView but I don't really want to switch languages...

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Haha I would love to and it seems like a really great language/community/ecosystem. I'm just a part-time developer though, so my "coding time" is extremely limited and mainly just around scratching an itch as quickly as possible. I'm confident Elixir/Phoenix would give me that speed and comfort too, but I already know Rails and the time I would spend learning Elixir/Phoenix just to get access to LiveView would be better spent just learning Javascript and moving on.

I wish I had a use case where Elixir's concurrency model makes the initial lift worth it, but my work doesn't even require me to learn how to make Ruby scale past a $5 DigitalOcean droplet.

Yeah, that makes sense. For smaller projects, I don't think anything matches Ruby in terms of pure solo-dev productivity. I still use it for scripting.

One thing I would advise, given your situation, is to avoid full-blown SPAs. You can use something like Stimulus Reflux and be way more productive than going down the whole React/Redux/library explosion rabbit hole. Ditto for spending a lot of time on Kubernetes, Docker, etc.

If you're not a full-time dev, just do things with the minimum abstraction needed.

You're spot on. I tried React and Vue and it just adds so much complexity for a solo dev. Right now I'm just using tiny bits of JS here and there, but I'm really hungry for something like LiveView that would let me do interactive front-ends while not having to manage state and authentication on the front-end.

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