Another popular thread that comes to mind is the one about Discord scaling Elixir (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14748028 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19238221)
I'm on my second team that has adopted Elixir and it has really helped our productivity being able to keep so many capabilities in one kit.
It helps you to add lots of tiny quality of life improvements to your product that you wouldn't bother with normally.
> For one I really do think Elixir is a horrible career choice and I wanna save young average developers who still have time to correct that mistake (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27204755)
Sadly, your trolling is too subtle to get shadow banned, so we are doomed to keep reading your inane comments in every Elixir thread, hiding under the cowardly guise of "doing it for the young developers."
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
> Im not at all negative about Elixir. It could be a fantastic tool, I never used it. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26905869)
Thinking back, I remember that the guy had 1-2 good points but the rest was mostly ranting. They are fun to read but rarely are informative.
I have also had good results with non-Elixir coders learning it with a bit of coaching, and recruiting is OK these days due to interest of developers for the language.
Having a balanced pros and cons are great for everyone. Not every thread should be praising Elixir else people won't be able to make an informed decision before selecting a language to build their business on.
I'm personally more interested in cons of a tool as opposed to the pros. This way I can assess whether the failure points are within the acceptable parameters or not.
Is there any place to read about this on a more or less basic level? I bet many people will just ask what benefits they may get from this instead of apps build using Go (for example) + rabbitmq
If you're going all in on cloud, microservices, and managed services, then - outside some specific problems - I'm not sure if Elixir is any better of a choice than other language. I personally like immutability+FP but that feels a bit subjective.
But I've worked at small companies for most of my career, and it's my (obviously subjective) opinion that Elixir will let you build a better system if you don't have the luxury of using the "right tool for each task".
Many underestimate this but it's a huge benefit for most projects that don't need a complex deployment pipeline.
My impression is that some (not all) people had a bad experience partly because they may have reached for Elixir at a period where everything wasn't "settled" (a bit too young). The "first vague of hype" generated some libraries which are now unmaintained (e.g. oauth2), and some parts are still rough (XML, I look at you).
Having upgraded a number of old apps, though, I find that library quality has gone up, the overall developer (and maintainer) experience has improved, and there is a sense of stability which will have a real impact I believe.
There is a need to reach a larger critical mass I believe to really enjoy things in full, but as far as I am concerned, I would be perfectly confident to build my next SaaS on top of it.
I found it to be extremely performant (especially when compared to the built in xmerl) and I like using the SAX technique.
Thanks for reporting a good experience, this gives me hope that my task won't be daunting!
I have been doing elixir for the past ~1yr and from my experience it's the language itself is pretty good, but I really wish it had better tooling, static typing, and more mature libraries for interacting with common tools. Just my own opinion, but I would chose another language for future projects.
most insights there, in relation to leaving, are not about the language but in relation to the environment, e.g available packages, integration with external tools etc. as reasons for the aforementioned departures.