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Comment by brightball | Hacker News Reader

It's understandable. Elixir is one of those languages you won't really appreciate until you've experienced the problems that it addresses.

You're getting down voted mostly because of your tone (IMO) but the appeal if Elixir is just a reality of experience.

When I found it, I was 15 years in my career and when I dove in, learned it and saw how it addressed so many short term and long term issues that appear in application development...the balance was the closest thing I'd seen to perfect.

But if I hadn't experienced the pain, I would never have appreciated it all the little details.

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It would be nice if you elaborated on what those problems are and how elixir solves them better than existing alternatives.

All I ever see is people exclaiming how awesome it is and then the responses turn out to be underwhelming for various reasons. Like hot reloading isn't that special or unique anymore.

I feel like this talk does a great job of answering that question - The Soul of Erlang and Elixir by Saša Jurić (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvBT4XBdoUE)

lol, there's the hot reloading.

But that's an interesting talk. I didn't have time to go through the whole thing but the core of it seems to be the pros of erlang like BEAM's high concurrency advantages and uniformity of tools running on top of otp.

It's an interesting argument.

I need to write about it more. The most in depth piece I've written was this one:

https://blog.codeship.com/comparing-elixir-go/

Hot reloading is very unique though (but not necessary for most use cases). There's no other stack outside of the BEAM that has an equivalent. A lot of what is offered by the BEAM isn't even possible in other stacks because it requires a collective of language decisions working together.

Doing this for 7 years, have yet to seen a problem throwing more servers/caching/database locks can't handle. I'm not saying those problems don't exist, I'm just saying it's not that common. Agree about the tone, was having a rough morning (plus: why does every Rails thread turn into a "you should really try Elixir!" , yeah we don't like our stack to be constantly shat on by Elixir guys)

Of course you can throw more servers/caching/database locks, but the advantage of using Elixir & Phoenix is that you can do a lot more with less.

Think how much the code would be simpler and easier to reason about without caching. Or reducing the numbers of servers you need from 150 to 2 and with better performance [1]

[1] https://www.techworld.com/apps-wearables/how-elixir-helped-b...

> yeah we don't like our stack to be constantly shat on by Elixir guys)

Sorry to be blunt but this is nonsense, languages and stacks are just tools.

When I was working on banking systems the idea of using dynamic typed language would have been insane. Now that I’m in a two man’s shop working on low traffic web app I’m happily using Rails for the CRUD work. And if tomorrow I were to work on a public high traffic real-time app like Discord I would do it in Elixir. There is no such thing as your stack.

Usually there's the 1-2 tools you're most comfortable with, unless you're a true generalist. Most people can't be incredible in Rails/Django/Spring/Node/.NET at the same time, you have to pick 1-2 things you excel at. You can be efficient in 5 tools at the same time, but not an expert (for most people. some people are great at everything they put their hands on).

You seem to have a bunch of experience with Phoenix, could you suggest some tutorials that will be helpful for people who start from scratch learning elixr and this type of development.

Coming from a php / node.js background it seems very overwhelming

The default phoenix guide are really good and should be understandable if you come from php. https://hexdocs.pm/phoenix/overview.html

The default elixir-lang getting started is pretty good. https://elixir-lang.org/getting-started/introduction.html

Some people prefer this community one https://elixirschool.com/en/

This video course is fantastic:

https://pragmaticstudio.com/elixir

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