Also, I wish they had a ORM like Sequel. These two are really what is holding me back from going full in on Elixir. Anyone can care to comment on this?
The mental shift is that "schemas" are not objects in an ORM sense, but instead are just data, or views over data. The functions come from taking in data or a Changeset and manipulating those, versus calling a function on a class.
As far as errors, Elixir 1.4.5 has much better error messages, specifically printing the args to crashes and such, and OTP 20/ Elixir 1.5 should drastically improve Dialyzer error messages. I am not a Ruby guy, so perhaps you can say what you feel is missing from Elixir's messages and how the Ruby gem improves it. Also you can literally inspect running state on the fly with the BEAM tooling, so the need for things like debuggers goes down.
(For context, Dialyzer is a static analysis tool detecting type errors which is part of the core Erlang distribution.)
OTP-14369 Application(s): compiler, dialyzer, stdlib
Related Id(s): PR-1367
The format of debug information that is stored in BEAM
files (when debug_info is used) has been changed. The
purpose of the change is to better support other
BEAM-based languages such as Elixir or LFE.
All tools included in OTP (dialyzer, debugger, cover,
and so on) will handle both the new format and the
previous format. Tools that retrieve the debug
information using beam_lib:chunk(Beam, [abstract_code])
will continue to work with both the new and old format.
Tools that call beam_lib:chunk(Beam, ["Abst"]) will not
work with the new format.
For more information, see the description of debug_info
in the documentation for beam_lib and the description
of the {debug_info,{Backend,Data}} option in the
documentation for compile.
May be a matter of semantics, but the concept of ORM simply can't exist in a functional language as there aren't objects. That said, Ecto is pretty much the go-to in Elixir. It's extremely powerful, and in my opinion provides the right amount of abstraction without going too far.
Ecto can do a reasonable impression with its DSL & direct use of tables. You don't need to go through the whole stack of schemas and such.
What in particular do you like about Sequel (over what Ecto is providing)?