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Comment by jondubois | Hacker News Reader

Phoenix is way overhyped, particularly on HN. This is the same as what happened with Golang and then with Rust.

A few years ago, I remember that all these articles kept popping up about people switching from Node.js to Go.

Now it's funny because fairly recently I read a well thought out article on HN encouraging developers to dump Go for Node.js... These days you hardly read anything about Go at all. Not that there is anything wrong with it, but reality caught up with the hype and it's no longer pretending to be a silver bullet.

Right now Phoenix is pretending to be a silver bullet, but it's really not.

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It's underhyped because the concepts Elixir brings to the table are most likely alient to most Rails developers (myself included at the time!)

Most people think it's about a faster activerecord, it's not. It's so much more!

I really like Ecto for several reasons, but mostly because it makes every database call super obvious. If you Repo.something(), you're probably hitting the database.

A couple other reasons I like it: 1. It's makes shooting yourself in the foot with N+1 queries really difficult. 2. It's not married to Phoenix. I haven't tried this in a while and maybe this isn't representative of the current state of things, but last time I tried to use AR in a non-Rails project, I ended up switching to Sequel gem.

For a nice, if not slightly biased, comparison of AR and Ecto, I recommend Darin Wilson's talk "Thinking in Ecto"[0].

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQxopjai0CU

I’m old enough to remember when people said Rails was overhyped:)

Hype aside, I really like Phoenix a lot.

For what it's worth, this submission is a comparison of Phoenix -- a framework explicitly inspired by Rails and which has some core members who were/are Rails core members -- and Rails.

I had similar thoughts initially. After understanding erlang's OTP concepts, it all became clear. Phoenix's simplicity combined with the power of erlang&otp is fantastic.

Mind linking me that article about dumping Go for Node.js? I'd love to hear the reasoning behind that!

https://github.com/maxpert/raspchat/releases/tag/v1.0.0-alph...

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