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Comment by tmat | Hacker News Reader

I think what I learned the most about my past year of working heavily in Elixir is this.. Don't learn elixir.. learn Erlang/OTP if you really want to harness the power of Elixir. Elixir is nothing but a series of macros which give erlang some convenience and better syntax.

If you learn to harness the power of Erlang, while writing it in Elixir, then you will see the beauty of it. Get away from Phoenix as fast as possible. Seriously it will do you wonders. It's so unnecessary and cumbersome.

OTP, OTP, OTP.. can't say it enough.

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I learned Phoenix and OTP at basically the same time. I knew I'd need to build out a worker queueing system as part of a web app, so I started reading an OTP book while I was building the initial structure of the Phoenix app. By the time I needed to do more interesting things than just a crud app, I could work with GenServers and Supervision trees.

The moment that the lightbulb went on for me was when I ran `iex -S mix` in my Phoenix project and fired up erlang's observer to see its processes. I realized that phoenix is just a supervision tree made up of different microservices, much more complicated than the toy projects I'd built, but still relied on the same OTP tools and patterns. And once you understand that, it becomes trivial to use OTP to expand the functionality that Phoenix gives you out of the box.

I think what you're trying to say (and I agree if you are) is that Phoenix and Elixir are great, but you are missing out on what makes Elixir so powerful (Erlang/OTP and BEAM) if you stop there.

Yep, that's exactly it. I'm just not very eloquent ;)

I do Erlang full time. But seeing how much traction Elixir has, I say learn whatever looks more interesting. If you're developing for the web and Phoenix looks good, start with Elixir.

At the end of the day, they are both built on the same foundational concepts. You might find that you need to look up Erlang docs or find an Erlang SO answer so might as well learn the basic Erlang syntax as well. Then you have access to a larger community. Listen to Erlang Factory or Joe Armstrong's videos and so on.

How does Phoenix detract from from the elixir/erlang experience? I was under the impression that it was just a web framework? I'm pretty naive on the subject—I've just never seen something like this brought up before.

Well in my situation Phoenix is really overkill. I don't build monolithic apps anymore. To me Phoenix felt lake taking Ruby and slapping it on Elixir. It didn't really feel like, "The Elixir Way." So I set out and learned Plug(which is mostly what Phoenix is).

I build all my front ends as stand alone ReactJS apps, so I found it very strange to need Phoenix at all. I started learning to work with OTP & Plug and realized that I can build a json-api spec API in complete Elixir without any phoenix requirements and if I need to add sockets it's very very trivial to do so.

The amount of code needed to make this all work in pure elixir is minimal.

Essentially I just didn't need it for the way I build applications these days.

That makes sense. I was under the impression that you were saying something along the lines "Phoenix breaks erlang," but the complaint that Phoenix is too bulky is pretty common.

Can you please explain your position a bit more?

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