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Comment by arcturus17 | Hacker News Reader

I’m primarily a React / Node dev, but I’ve been thinking about picking up another language and framework for a while. I feel like Node / Express is great, but I also sometimes feel like it’s not a proper framework, in that you end up assembling a lot of code by hand (ex: auth, data modeling) and after a few projects it’s tedious. Also, Node only offers concurrency as an unnatural afterthought...

I’ve dabbled in Django and it seems to solve some of those problems, but I also feel like web programming in an OO dynamic scripting language isn’t that far away from doing it in JS so I might as well learn something mind-blowingly new...

I’ve been exposed to functional programming in OCaml in a rigorous college course and absolutely loved it, how would you guys rate learning Phoenix + Elixir in my case?

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I think you're right to explore something else and I'm not aware of anything better than Elixir/Phoenix in the Web Framework world currently. It's incredibly well thought out and an absolute joy to use once you get through the initial learning curve.

I spent many years doing Python before getting talked into learning Clojure and it was incredibly eye-opening and made me a much better developer, so there is no bigger partisan than me for trying something completely different to your current skill-set. Give it a go!

why is elxir/phoenix better than clojure/luminus?

They a pretty comparable, I think the reason elixir is gaining more popularity, is mainly due to it looking like ruby rather than lisp. Also, I personally feel like the BEAM is better for handling concurrency than the JVM.

You'd probably pick it up pretty quickly.

I learned Phoenix + Elixir not too long ago and I felt quite productive with it after a few weeks with no formal functional programming experience. I started building a non-trivial app right from the start.

Here's how I tackled learning it in my spare time: https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/learning-a-new-web-framework-...

I started with Node and Backbone (then React) and then really got into Rails for a side project and then went to Elixir in 2016.

Especially if you've used ImmutableJS, I don't think you'll have a hard time with Elixir.

One thing I don't miss about Node is that there are a lot of choices different teams make differently. In Rails or Phoenix (and I'd assume Django), it's a lot more likely that you can jump into an existing project and mostly know where everything is.

Go for it! Only issue- you won't go back to node/django after going deep in Elixir. Really elegant + succinct.

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