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Comment by fredrikholm | Hacker News Reader

I'd like to throw in Phoenix LiveView here.

Rails wins every battle for initial development speed, as the conventions are so thorough and well thought out that nothing even remotely comes close. Laravel is creeping in, but it's not there yet IMO.

LiveView however, scales better (in every sense of the word). It also comes with batteries included (auth, database access, jobs, mailer, complete testing kit etc), little-to-no-DIY-JS, and one of the finest VMs there is (BEAM).

If nothing else, I'm happy that these projects all fight the "let's take a step back"-fight. At $DAYJOB I write React with Relay and the amount of hoops one needs to jump through is exhausting, even though I've been writing frontend JS for many years now and consider myself half decent in it.

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> Laravel is creeping in, but it's not there yet IMO.

Could you elaborate on this?

Other than learning for fun. Is there enough of a benefit to learning Elixir if you would already consider yourself an expert at PHP/Laravel and JS/Vue ?

At a glance it's hard to see the value or believe that it has the same longevity or $$$ value.

Elixir is like an alien shiny flying soucer. It can do all types of technical marvels with a simplicity that is not possible without disfiguring more traditional frameworks. So I'd say having a cursory glance at it is a must.

In terms of $$$ value, it is extremely efficient --including all the "alien" stuff, and that's why it's so cool. An Elixir team will generally create things cheaper to build and operate.

Now, the question is how many Elixir shops you are going to find a job with, but the answer to that depends on the type of career trajectory you are choosing. For example, Rails is not an industry standard by any means if you think in terms of classic IT consulting jobs but has a stronger dev mindshare in startups, so there you go.

It's a tough market for Elixir devs at the moment - there seem to be a lot more people who want to work with Elixir than there are companies hiring for it. But on the flipside, that means if you're a company who wants to take a chance on Elixir, there are lots of available devs to hire!

Personally, I'm comfortable betting my career on Elixir at the moment. It's too goddamn good to remain a niche language - I expect it to get a lot bigger in the years ahead as more companies and devs fall in love with it. It'll happen slowly, and it's never going to reach the level of saturation that that, say, Javascript has, but I think it has a bright future.

Phoenix and LiveView are a joy to work with, much more so than any previous technology I've used. I haven't yet looked at any of the exciting new ML stuff that's happening in the Elixir world (Nx etc.) but hopefully they'll drive adoption too. I'm never going back to my old ways.

The craziest thing with Elixir is that you can do things all by yourself in the same time that would normally take a big team and consequent infrastructure to do.

As someone who's spent the bulk of his career in Rails and then Phoenix, to me it's the other way around: everything else is just so goddamn slow and unproductive. Don't people realise that it doesn't have to be like this?

Wait, are you saying that you are more productive in Rails than in Phoenix? That seems to be the opposite of what the consensus view in this thread is.

I'm reading it as "Rails and Phoenix is more productive than other technologies".

Yes.

You are more productive on the thing you know the most. Shocking

No, I'm saying that I'm more productive in either Rails or Phoenix than I am in anything else.

(And of the two, I'm more productive in Phoenix, but I didn't mention that in the comment you're replying to.)

Allow me to disagree. Finding good engineers that are knowledgeable with Elixir has been difficult to the point that we’ve hired people that never professionally used the language to senior positions. That’s not a problem on its own, since the language is mostly easy to learn, but there definitely is no abundance.

Try posting your job ad on the Elixir Slack (elixir-lang.slack.com) - there's a lot of jobseekers in there.

(I think the only way to join the Slack atm is to be manually invited because the signup app got broken by Heroku's pricing changes - but if you email the address in my profile then I'll ask someone to invite you.)

Its biggest strength is that it is good at almost everything (normal CRUD, websockets, distributed systems, easy to deploy as a single binary). Elixir/Erlang could be your entire stack

Just gave it a look. Dynamically typed. IMO if scalability is on the table, having types is a huge benefit.

It saddens me that ruby, python, elixir, JS... many of the best and most productive backend frameworks have types as an afterthought only.

Rust is cool, but it's also hard to write(did last year's AoC using it, and it was fast to run, slow to write).

Anyone have any recommendations for me? Should I look at go/gin perhaps? No Java please - I need type inference because I'm a spoiled baby.

Edit: anyone tried crystal? Looks promising, but doesn't seem popular...

Typing is coming!

Java already has type inference...

If you search Crystal on HN, there are a few user who are happy with it. Unfortunately most of them are only using it for personal projects.

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