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Comment by vendiddy | Hacker News Reader

Some of your points are valid (like the LSP) but for our company I've found Elixir has been a great developer experience if you take the good with the bad.

I'm curious what you're working on with Elixir because my experience overall has not been the same.

For example our releases take 10 minutes to cut.

Or when I ask questions on Discord I tend to get answers pretty quickly.

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I can only say that it’s in the definition of the "critical system". I wouldn’t risk exposing minimal implementation detail to third party (i.e. Discord).

It’s not a specific build but the whole thing, e.g. build takes 10 minutes, but test suite takes 10 minutes as well. Test suite can fail because of a bug or (more often) because of some race condition or build issue.

As I mentioned - today I’m working with Go. It’s nowhere near BEAM but it’s not critical, I never spent more than 15 minutes debugging Go race condition.

And yes, code is at fault, but I’d expect ecosystem to help fixing it, but we have none. E.g. circular dependendencies in umbrella. You can have them. You can print them. There is no warning. They result in inconsistent builds and 40s LSP check loops, during which I have zero access to documentation.

But if I use arrow for map I will get a warning and a compilation error.

> And yes, code is at fault, but I’d expect ecosystem to help fixing it, but we have none. E.g. circular dependendencies in umbrella. You can have them. You can print them. There is no warning.

Can you reproduce this in any way? Because I cannot:

    mix new parent --umbrella
    cd parent
    mix new apps/foo
    mix new apps/bar

Now change `Foo.hello` to call `Bar.hello` and vice-versa. When you run `mix compile`, you will get warnings like this:

    warning: Bar.hello/0 is undefined (module Bar is not available or is yet to be defined). Make sure the module name is correct and has been specified in full (or that an alias has been defined)

But of course, the `foo` and `bar` applications do not depend on each other, you can add explicit dependencies, such as `foo` depending on `bar` or `bar` depending on `foo`, but you always get warnings. And if you literally make it a dependency cycle, the app doesn't even boot:

    ** (Mix) Could not sort dependencies. The following dependencies form a cycle: foo, bar

Apps have to be compiled in order and one will by definition be compiled before the other, so it is really unclear how you could have those circular dependencies.

But even then, let's say that somehow you have an undeclared and undefined cycle between `foo` and `bar`. The point of umbrella projects is that each app can be compiled in isolation, so you should be able to go to `bar` and compile it in isolation without `foo`, and if it is trying to invoke `foo` somehow, it will be made visible.

So yes, I would need a way to reproduce this, because there are warnings and tooling in place to deal with those. Thanks!

I've built things for a number of armed forces and I have a very hard time believing that what you're working on is so secret and sensitive that it's not possible to ask a third party for input on an isolated replication case of your problem. Surely you can cut away at it until nothing but dry technicalities are left? I can understand the problem in regular engineering, but in software I don't really see it.

What is your company building with Elixir?

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