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Comment by sam_goody | Hacker News Reader

OT, but considering the audience...

I have a side project / website that I want to work on. I have over a decade experience with PHP and JS in various forms, but am willing to try something new.

The idea of compiled languages don't appeal to me, so am not really interested in Go, Rust or Dart. It looks like either Django, Elixir, or PHP - but am open to other ideas.

Anyone with enough experience to tell me confidently that it is worth Django or Elixir? Anyone can give a five line overview of the differences vs PHP or Node?

And along the way, am I the only one who is confused by what seems too many environments and package managers? (from venv/virtualenv[1] to pip/easy_install to wheels/eggs)

[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/q/41573587/87520

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Django: Great if you are building only a backend or rest API with a separate frontend (an SPA in React, etc). The templates system is terrible, has no asset pipeline built in and frontend on it feels like developing in the 90s. You'll miss php a lot here.

Elixir: Technologically "mind blowing", although all the nice things come from the Erlang VM and not from Elixir itself in my opinion. You will likely not find any job using Elixir, if you do it is going to be full of people just learning the language so the codebase will be very likely a disaster. You will miss a lot of libraries and you will have to write code for things you'd take for given in the PHP ecosystem. Be ready to fight your editor plugins (depending on which one you use, and the degree of IDEisms you're used to).

I understand you want to learn something new, so the most "radical" one here that will teach you more new things is clearly Elixir.

But other than learning purposes, If I were to build something for real, I'd stick with PHP and Laravel, it's an incredible productive, well documented and well thought out platform to develop in.

No difference, it is just a matter of preference and selecting the best tool for the job. Often times the best tool for the job is the one that you know how to use really well.

If you’re good with Laravel for example, no need to switch to Django or Elixir and vice versa. Stick with what you know and you’ll be a happier developer.

IMHO, Elixir & Phoenix are such a breath of fresh air, plus power, plus adaptability, and I love the functional capabilties. On the other hand, if your want lots of numeric computation tooling, AI/ML, stats, etc. then Python & Django have better/more math-adjancent integrations.

For environment management have a look at poetry https://python-poetry.org/

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