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Comment by lefrenchy | Hacker News Reader

I’ve been wanting to use LiveView so bad, it’s just incredibly hard to justify to a team when React is working just fine :(

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LiveView and Elixir combine to in my opinion to make the only platform that's enjoyable for front end and backend developers.

Front-end developers love the LiveView model with functional components, no state, and light node.js dependency.

Backend developers get a process/actor + OTP supervision tree that's second to none. Horizontally scalable, functional, and pretty simple at its core.

Fullstack developers get to transition seamlessly.

I've really enjoyed using it while building.

> light node.js dependency

Pedantic but just for drive-by readers, there isn't really any nodejs dependency. You can use it to manage JS dependencies, or you can forgo it for "vendoring" with esbuild (or bun, etc).

Liveview itself has a small JS component that is mostly transparent (socket.connect() basically). You can of course add more JS too it.

Was going to comment the same. I haven't had to touch node or npm in a year or so.

If you're looking for something to do,

implement this:

https://www.deepmind.com/blog/decoupled-neural-interfaces-us...

in this:

https://hexdocs.pm/nx/Nx.html

Someone at our local meetup said it was the future.

Wow. This paper is _very_ well written. I am not an expert in neural networks, but the concepts were very well described and diagramed and I was able to follow along.

I would read a whole book about neural networks written in this style.

I’m experienced with Elixir but have no idea what all this is. Can you break it down for me and it’s benefits?

Normally, ML training is via back propagation, which is a synchronous technique. If you try to trivially parallelize, it doesn't work, for reasons (tm).

This lets you train a machine learning model of arbitrary size (bigger than can fit on a GPU, or even a multigpu node) using an actor-based distributed technique. There is a slight training cycles count penalty but it's way less than the cost of coordination.

I love Elixir and Phoenix/LiveView, but I have the same problem. I think it will need to gain the proverbial 10x improvement over React and JS frameworks in general before people consider it.

Sometimes you can come in the side door. I built a testbed reservation app for the GUI team I work with using Phoenix LiveView. The Product manager was surprised out fast I hammered it out. So far everyone is using it without a hitch. It's not product code, but it's still in active use with no problems.

It is hard to justify, especially when front-end devs are monoglots. I bet your backend is Node + Mongo.

not just this, but also no one knows elixir. Its a very niche language for very niche set of tasks, rewriting existing apps form react to elixir just to use liveview is a pointless overkill

Elixir the language is not niche at all, and you can achieve practically everything with it. But maybe you meant adoption numbers.

Not niche at all.

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