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Comment by y04nn | Hacker News Reader

Maybe it was true 6 years ago, but I'm currently playing with Elixir/Phoenix and I feel very productive, Phoenix is well design and adding new functionalities is not that hard and the code is easy to debug. On the other side, Elixir and Erlang are not that popular and every time I talk about it to other developers, they may have heard of it but can't talk about it, so it's probably not that easy to find devs for a startup. But the barrier to entry is probably what keeps the libraries well designed. For anyone interested in Elixir I would start with those books in this order "Elixir in Action", "Programming Ecto" and "Programming Phoenix Liveview".

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(EDIT: To clarify, my comment is only a response to "not that easy to find Elixir devs for a startup")

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I don't speak for anyone except myself and a few acquaintances but I wouldn't accept an offer to work on a startup with Elixir unless we're talking at least $15,000 a month or more. And even then it depends a lot on team and company culture. I am tired of sprinting without that ever being connected to me getting extra cash or even recognition.

Elixir and Phoenix are productive as hell but they also need deliberate approach and not everything should be done quickly. Requiring me to churn out 3-5 features a week in the first 6 months is the best way for me to hand my resignation a mere two weeks after starting.

Sorry, you might not have had this in mind, I am just reacting to your text.

But rest assured, ElixirForum has quite a few people who would grab an Elixir job if given the opportunity, some for as low as $2500 a month even. And most people frequenting the forum mostly check its own Jobs section. So if you really want to widen your options, definitely make a job ad post there.

Isn't this concern independent of the language?

> Requiring me to churn out 3-5 features a week in the first 6 months is the best way for me to hand my resignation a mere two weeks after starting.

Actually no it isn't, I was indeed mixing Elixir and non-Elixir concerns in one comment.

Did the parent comment get updated? It doesn't track to what you've put here.

No it hasn't. As I stated, I was only reacting to his "not that easy to find Elixir devs for a startup" is all.

It sounds like you just dont want to work at a startup? What does that have to do with elixir?

Yes I don't want to work for a startup and I stated as much didn't I? ;)

What it has to do with Elixir is that Elixir does not scale well with a number of programmers, and many startups go through periods of explosive growth of personnel. With Elixir that very rarely works well, 99% of the time IMO it does not. Adding more people does not increase productivity, it hurts it even.

Do you think that’s inherent to the language, or a result of common patterns?

How do other languages, like Python, scale better to more devs, besides more devs available? All that comes to mind immediately is modules in Elixir being globally available, but I’m genuinely curios about your experiences.

It's mostly related to the fact that Elixir code is very terse and easy to understand, and that if you put 100 devs on a singular Phoenix web/API project codebase they will be stepping on each others' toes all the time so they need to kind of take turns if they don't want the codebase to become a complete mess.

Thirdly, Elixir devs are on average quite senior in general (as they are usually refugees from other stacks) which lends itself to one-man armies very well in my almost 8 years of experience working with Elixir.

This doesn't track with my experience.

We scaled an org with both Ruby and Elixir (later, 1 of the 2 blessed languages) and there was no tangible difference in that way.

You could also scale in other ways like microservice. Elixir plays great in that world, as pretty much every language does.

Regarding one man armies. Usual way I've seen to scale is to find those one man armies and put less expensive Jr + mid engineers on their team and have them work together. I don't think that's an Elixir thing though.

I'm not trying to sell Elixir here. I think it has benefits in smaller org size that mellow out and equalize as a company grows. Also, startups should always work in whatever language is most comfortable to founding team.

Hard to argue against anecdotal evidence one way or the other -- my view is probably skewed because I usually avoid big companies.

RE: microservices, yep, that's one of the ways to scale Elixir teams to more people indeed.

RE: one-man armies, agreed.

> I'm not trying to sell Elixir here. I think it has benefits in smaller org size that mellow out and equalize as a company grows.

No worries, I am sold for 8 years now. ;)

And yes, the benefits kind of plateau from one dev count and up I found. That was kind of the core of my comment, too.

> Also, startups should always work in whatever language is most comfortable to founding team.

Oh, absolutely. I love Elixir a lot but won't shill for it if I find myself in a situation where it would be a bad choice. Plus in startups development speed is probably the biggest asset of the programmers so I am not judging. (Though I don't want to work for startups anymore.)

Is it any different than Ruby in this manner? I've worked at companies with 60 ruby engineers we do fine. It's called writing tests.

Does stepping on each other's toes happen, of course! but no worse than typescript, java, etc.

I don't buy this argument.

It's 50/50 and really depends on the people, this is just my 8-year old experience, I don't make it as an argument that's truthful beyond any doubt.

There is also the fact that the companies I chose to work with didn't want a lot of Elixir devs and we truly made miracles happen with teams of 2 to 8 people.

What is the best freely accessible Phoenix tutorial? I recently searched a bit, tried a bit, but then ran into a problem, that should not have happened according to the tutorial. I guess the tutorial was outdated (got the RoR vibes from years ago). I could not fix it, due to the lack of understanding of how Phoenix works and what it wants me to do. Gave up again (for the second time) on learning Phoenix. Is there an always kept up-to-date tutorial around somewhere? I might consider it again, since I want to learn what liveview and all that is really about and how well it can make web apps etc.

I would get it from the phoenix's beak honestly - https://hexdocs.pm/phoenix/overview.html

agreed, the phoenix dubs and guides are excellent.

for elixir books, i strongly recommend sasa juric’s elixir in action—it’s the best explanation of processes and genservers i’ve found.

Pragmatic studios has great Elixir and Phoenix courses, they upgrade the courses regularly and you get access to the new versions without extra costs.

> On the other side, Elixir and Erlang are not that popular and every time I talk about it to other developers, they may have heard of it but can't talk about it, so it's probably not that easy to find devs for a startup.

This was the exact issue we encountered after I had switched a startup's backend from Node to Elixir. I was able to churn out features pretty quickly (and the switch itself turned the core batch job underlying the product from a multi-hour runtime to less than a minute), but the bus factor was pretty much 1 and we were never able to really increase that before the company ended up running out of runway and folding.

This was almost a decade ago, though, so things have hopefully improved somewhat.

Ya, I’ve given up trying to seriously introduce Erlang anywhere.

Lovely language whose community and vm taught me an absolute ton that still resonates with me today.

But for a bunch of “cats” that need to be herded, engineers tend to be fairly packish in some regards so looks like it’s Go, Java, Typescript, and TypeScript/HTML/CSS(in JS)/React for the foreseeable future

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