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Comment by brightball | Hacker News Reader

Elixir and Phoenix is what you're looking for. Most of the goodness of Rails for productivity, without the long term bad decisions that come with it to force eventual rewrites when the funding comes. There's a reason Rails core guys have put so much time into it.

It gets every...single...dang...decision...right. I may never use another language unless forced because it's what I've spent years trying to find.

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Nope. It doesn't. I've spent two years working with it. And "gets every single dang decision right" is a matter of opinion. Chris and José are incredibly wonderful people, but they are just as opinionated as the people behind Rails.

So "gets decisions right" sounds good as long as you agree with those decisions.

I happen to love working with Elixir and Phoenix. I find working with Ecto frustrating not because of the code, but because of the opinions the framework creators have made about where things go. They have good solid reasons for their opinions. And they are not wrong.

I just don't agree with them. And that's totally ok.

Depends on the decisions, but in my experience the way they've setup to do things encourages the proper balance of productivity, separation of concerns, maintainability and data integrity.

The balance on the database side of things has been most impressive because I didn't expect it at all coming from several years of Rails. In my experience to this point, the idea of letting your database enforce the integrity of your data was generally viewed as heresy. You could do it and the Rails team itself provided all of the tools to do it properly, but it seemed as if the community in general was totally opposed to it. The community shift towards embracing PostgreSQL so heavily has seemed to slowly be steering that trend away but there's still a lot of opposition. I've seen some tragic consequences because of those decisions in the last few years.

The balance encouraged in Programming Phoenix sets an excellent standard for a growing community.

The view + template layer has been a breath of fresh air.

Of course, to each his own.

Phoenix has me more excited about work than I've been in years though and I'm that guy that doesn't shut up about things that he loves. :-)

If you discover a hot new language/framework that solves all of your problems, then here is what you've actually learned: you didn't have any hard problems.

No tool is perfect for every situation, and if you find one that is perfect for every situation that you encounter, then that says a lot more about you than about the tool.

He's right though, Elixir and Phoenix are amazing. It promises the productivity of Rails, while being blazingly fast and scalable. You'll never, ever need to rewrite your backend, even if you're handling traffic at the scale of Whatsapp.

I would be hard-pressed to find a case where you'd want to write your web or mobile backend in anything else. So yeah, I'd claim that it's perfect for every web or mobile backend.

Also, no framework is ever going to solve all of your "hard problems", and he didn't claim that at all. It's simply a much better base than Rails.

It's about balance and this has the right one for about 95% of what I do everyday in terms of client-server-database work, productivity, concurrency, stability, performance and scalability. That's where I spend most of my time on the web.

Short of complex calculations or extreme niche scenarios...it does handle pretty much everything in terms of "around web" work. For niche scenarios use what's appropriate but for the space that Rails has occupied in the general purpose realm it's wonderful.

Why does someone come to promote Elixir and Phoenix in every Ruby/Rails article? The first times was nice to see someone showing an alternative, now is almost like SPAM.

It's a religion.

More seriously, the community just needs to be a lot bigger before it's on par with the Ruby ecosystem. For example, there's currently no Elixir library that will inline CSS in emails before sending.

Honestly, I'm just excited.

Because the Elixir/Phoenix community is largely spawned from the Ruby/Rails community. They are more likely to be continuing to follow what is going on with Rails, even living in both worlds. There are many shared values and experience. That historical affinity is probably why it shows up so much in the same context. The Elixir/Phoenix community is more likely to respect and understand what Rails is and isn't as opposed to the vast majority of pretenders who say they are creating a framework inspired by, or to rival Rails, but really have no clue and proceed to put up something nowhere near the breadth or depth of Rails. Nobody who knows anything is going to come and put up an advocacy post for a PHP framework as an alternative to Rails. They know the Rails community has no interest in going that way. Elixir/Phoenix on the other hand can say with a straight face: we understand Rails and why it is successful and put forward Elixir/Phoenix as a legitimate way forward for those who want to move to a more functional paradigm and the inherent scalability advantages of a Erlang/OTA based foundation.

I really love Elixir and Phoenix and see myself using them heavily in the future, I just think you are completely not fair to Rails.

I've taught a course on Rails and I still use it everyday for work. It just has some long term weaknesses that are hard to swallow after a while.

I completely agree, I really enjoy H whatever Lotus.rb is called these days and especially like Trailblazer. So you could say that in general I agree with this sentiment, just, it would never cross my mind to be as hard to Rails as some of commenters are.

Rails is a mature framework now. A lot of people love to hate on mature stuff in programming.

Whoever downvoted me :) just made my score 666 !..! rock on baby!

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