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Comment by ffn | Hacker News Reader

This is awesome! I've been working with Phoenix for a bit now, and aside from the fact hex/phoenix doesn't yet have all the libraries that rubygems/rails have, Phoenix has blown my expectations out of the water. For such a big and complex framework, the entire functional plug system (functional is love, functional is life) makes the whole thing easy to grok in a way utterly unimaginable in a traditional rails framework.

By the way, in case core team is reading, what's the motivation behind removing infer_model_view from the render functions?

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I haven't done much either with Elixir or Ruby (I do more Python and Erlang). But one thing I noticed is Valim (and others on the team) created a really approachable langauge and framework. Their emphasis on new comers, documentation, friendliness of community is outstanding.

Also Elixir will bring more people to the BEAM VM and take advantage of it, as I think it is a gem of engineering.

It's great having new people, but hopefully we'll avoid the clusterfuck of gems and node modules that are the hallmark of the perpetually-immature web development community.

I know you're being downvoted but I 100% agree with you. I don't want 100,000 Hex packages. I want a few thousand packages that solve problems really well and people rally around and collaborate on them. NPM and RubyGems are casualties of people seeking open source fame and I hope we can avoid that in Elixir.

Eh, worst case, we can make another hex that enforces good test coverage and documentation. :)

This is totally nonsense. Any among those 100000 could become the most used library in their specific field at some point in time, and the fact that you can choose to contribute to whichever you like more, or create your own is the beauty of OSS. If you fear this will weaken devs ability to focus their strength on just one common solution, and be inefficient, then you really don't know how OSS works. What you want to impose, is something that already happens spontaneously in OSS (one gem taking over the other, unless they provide very different features or to do things in a drastically different manner).

Counter-argument: the entire Javascript ecosystem.

    > NPM and RubyGems are casualties of people seeking
    > open source fame and I hope we can avoid that in Elixir.

No, they're casualties of people actually using the platform, the platform's low publishing barrier, and the ecosystem's preference for focused libraries over monolithic bouncy castles.

Rallying around one library sounds cool until you see that the top three competing solutions in another ecosystem each have more contributors and activity. Then you realize you're not in the elite ecosystem, just the smaller one that has one library like my tiny Texas hometown.

Yeah because those 20+ half-baked MongoDB drivers on npm are totally better than emongo (Erlang) and mongo (Elixir).

I don't use Mongo, but I don't see any competitive alternatives to node-pg.

Pretty much what rubiquity said. Inflection was causing confusion and explicit > implicit almost always, so we decided to drop it.

> By the way, in case core team is reading, what's the motivation behind removing infer_model_view from the render functions?

I'm not on the core team, but speaking as an Elixir user, explicitness trumps all virtues.

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