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Comment by commitpizza | Hacker News Reader

I have tried Liveview and I have looked at alternatives and I have to say that even if I don't use Phoenix or Elixir on daily basis, Liveview is easily the best out there.

The developer experience is great and Phoenix is just a great framework. The speed in which one can create stuff is mind blowing which is going to be the biggest pull factor into the language imo. My main issue is that Elixir is great for a lot of hard problems but for the easy, common problems it is lacking a lot in libraries and so on. It also has a high learning curve.

Although it is probably just going to get better in time the learning curve will probably not.

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IME a lot of the learning curve is functional programming, shortly followed by OTP. If you've ever worked with a functional language picking up on the OTP abstractions (eg. GenServer) is a small hill to climb in order to become effective on a day-to-day basis.

That said, with every new language comes idioms, tools and libraries that one has to learn, but this is true for all languages.

True and honestly, as an experienced developer it wasn't that huge of a step to start coding in Elixir. It's just that I (at least) is still thinking in an object-oriented way even when I'm working in Elixir because that is what I am used to.

I think the hardest part is to let go of some of the old practices and embrace functional programming as much as you can.

I would like to work with elixir professionally but have yet to find an employer that uses it in production :)

Many Elixir companies will hire and train you if you have previous experience. If you're really interested, it's worth reaching out!

Yeah, 100%. I'd say half or more of the Elixir devs I've hired had no Elixir experience before. I've found most people pick up the basics easily, and the language is super approachable.

What libraries are missing? So far, I've only missed having a library for interacting with Google Sheets. I got around that with a Lambda running Python. Everything else either had an Elixir library or there was no library in any language.

Well.. tons of specific libraries are obviously not there that exist in other languages that makes completing tasks faster.

And even if they do exist, the documentation is often very sparse or the library is not super actively maintained like in the big popular languages.

These are all stuff that obviously only get better with time and when people start working with elixir. It's not something that makes Elixir bad, it is just that you have to take that into account that when you want to do something very specific with an image or want that api wrapper for that api that isn't well known then you 'll have to implement it yourself instead of relying on some third party package.

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