Comment by Liberonostrud | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Liberonostrud | Hacker News Reader

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This is another problem of Phoenix. There are some big projects running on it, like cars.com but the code is not public and also they have a team of people who are good programmers and can bug-fix or pay people who can help bug-fix things for them. Watch the presentation of their switch to Phoenix and the gotchas they have encountered - for example how at first they didn't take into account the impact on Phoenix when users of sites like cars.com have opened 10 or 20 tabs (that have to be updated via websockets) instead of just 1 or 2 when they are comparing their dream car and how they thought that switching to Phoenix was a bad idea. Of course, they are smart ()or have money to pay smart programmers) and they solved this problem and now are happy with Phoenix ;). But as I said in previous posts, unlike with PHP that is very forgiving for sloppy code, Elixir does need higher skill level and the barrier to master it much, much higher than PHP.

Hi, software developer at Cars.com here. While I appreciate the ego boost of thinking that we're somehow better than average, I don't believe this to be true. You can get away with sloppy Elixir code just as easily as you can in PHP, Ruby, Python, etc.

> they thought that switching to Phoenix was a bad idea

If you have the time I recommend re-watching Zack's talk. This is not a take away, or implied.

I work on an application that's probably about as large as Cars.com and we've never run into an issue that was caused by phoenix or elixir specifically. We've had to write a few things in house that may be available off the shelf in other languages, but it's never been especially difficult or time consuming. Most of us are average devs, and it the tools just work. We love how easily we can run things in parallel and we have a lot of soft real time problems that the language makes trivial.

We also onboard a lot of people with no elixir experience, and most of them are committing code within a day or two. The docs are great and the surface area is pretty small. On boarding just isn't an issue.

You’re misrepresenting what’s being said in this talk (the relevant part of the talk is around the 15 minute mark at : https://youtu.be/XzAupUHiryg ).

The tldr was that they had patched some of the library code without considering the ramifications of the change. At no point in the talk is it said that “switching to Phoenix was a bad idea”.

Also, none of the issues they talk about are related to the lack of static typing.

https://github.com/laravel/laravel/pull/6010

So? Laravel uses type hinting, ok.

This has absolutely nothing to do with your previous post grossly misrepresenting a talk. You hadn’t even mentioned Laravel in it.

Type hinting is not equivalent to a static type system, which is what the parent was asking about.

Finally, in either cases, it changes nothing to the fact that the pain points mentioned in the talk were not caused by the lack of a static type system (which is not to say it cannot cause pain points)

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