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Comment by cpursley | Hacker News Reader

Elixir (with Phoenix) really is the sweet-spot for a productive framework that's fast, scalable and easy to pick up for a Rails developer:

https://medium.com/coryodaniel/from-erverless-to-elixir-4875...

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Isn't normal Rails the fast, scalable and easy to pick up framework for a Rails developer? Elixir has hype factor, but it still lacks the library ecosystem of Ruby. It's entirely possible to get to github scale with just Ruby and not have to learn all the gotchas of BEAM and OTP.

I've been using Elixir in production for four years now, in a fairly complex SaaS app, and I can comfortably say I've never had to "learn all the gotchas of BEAM and OTP". IMO Elixir/Phoenix do a really good job of abstracting all of that away from you, while still making it easy enough to tap into their intricacies if needed (e.g. if you want to write a GenServer for something).

Lack of library support was a bit annoying at first. But then I realized that, back when I used to take advantage of existing libraries in Ruby/Rails, in the vast majority of situations I was just utilizing a small portion of those libraries anyway. It ended up easy enough to write my own code for those features.

I have written Rails for 8 years and Elixir for 3. Phoenix is essentially what Rails should have been.

It has the upsides of Rails without the connected antipatterns, native technical debt.

I can also confirm that there isn't a need to learn BEAM gotchas (which i did learn). One of my ex colleagues is a junior dev who has been using elixir for 3 years now and didn't need to use those special aspects of BEAM.

As a Ruby expert, Elixir is substantially easier, learning BEAM is a joke (and very instructive) compared to learning the entirety of the Ruby object model.

I can't think of reasons to use Rails nowdays. If you are in the CRUD apps market, use Postgrest or similar products. As for the rest sure, choose any language you want, the framework is way less relevant (arguably: detrimental) at that point.

The industry has proven extensively that for non-trivial projects, Rails is damaging due to ActiveRecord.

Second this. I did rails for years and liked it a lot, but there were pain points, particularly as a project scaled.

Elixir/Phoenix solves a lot of these pain points and is a joy to work with. If you like Ruby/Rails then you already know quite a bit of Phoenix. Schedule yourself 4 hours to follow a tutorial or book.

Do you have any recommended books or tutorials?

For the language and the framework the official tutorial/documentation are pretty good.

Also Pragmatic Programmers has very good books on both, written by the creators.

I love Phoenix but I will disagree with the OP in 2 points.

Yes probably Elixir/Phoenix will manage better thousands of concurrent connections, but if you are doing personal projects or are a start-up that condition is irrelevant in the meantime. So that only lefts us with the big established applications. That does not mean Phoenix is not good, it only means you will not notice a difference with Rails for most of your projects.

The second thing, that OP failed to mention is that the Rails ecosystem is at least an order of magnitude larger. From the gems available, job opportunities,developers available, instructional material, SOP for many tasks and so on.That is boring, but valuable.

Programming Phoenix is good. You might want to look at something Elixir specific too, I liked Programming Elixir although I've heard good things about Elixir in Action as well.

The official online documentation is pretty good too.

I also used Programming Phoenix. Good book. I didn't find the code examples useful for "real world" stuff but they were good for learning.

If screencasts are your thing, I've put a lot of tutorials on YT. They start from scratch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1nKbzZiRtY&list=PLFhQVxlaKQ...

If you need high concurrency then Elixir is awesome but you can get the same performance from Ruby + lighter framework like Roda or Sinatra.

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