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Comment by jetti | Hacker News Reader

Interesting. How long did it take you to get up and running with Elixir to where you felt productive? I'm working on a new project and am thinking of using Elixir/Phoenix but my worry is when we hire that it will be harder to find those who are able to actually learn and get up to speed with Elixir rather quickly.

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We've been able to hire and leverage our existing Ruby developers to support our Elixir apps with success. It usually takes a couple of weeks of getting aquatinted when starting from scratch, but after that, execution increases linearly until it levels off at the developers' baseline.

If you're OK with questions:

One of the things that worries me about suggesting Elixir at the Rails shop that I work in is the concern that we'd have to develop a working knowledge of Erlang as well as Elixir. Can you speak to that?

The VM they both run on is the same - so you'd have to know some basics about that regardless. You'll also have to learn how to read Erlang syntax since there are many 3rd party Erlang libraries you can use from Elixir. The syntax is slightly different from Elixir, but the mental models are pretty much the same, so it's really not that difficult to get a working knowledge of reading Erlang.

Thank you, that was very clear and helpful.

My team was able to get up and running with elixir pretty quickly. I have an extensive ruby background and that helped me, but two other developers had python backgrounds. One was productive after a week the other after three. I think it really depends on how excited you are when you first get your hands on elixir.

Thanks for the response. Would you say that your team is above average when it comes to skill? I'm worried about hiring somebody off the street and having to teach them from the ground up

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