Comment by losvedir | Hacker News Reader

Comment by losvedir | Hacker News Reader

Everything old is new again. From my perspective as a Rails developer in the past, who landed on Elixir/Phoenix 10 years ago, Elixir and Phoenix were both born from Rails devs who were tired of Rails magic, keeping just the structure and bare minimum.

I've watched Ash spring up and build steam over these past several years with a bit of dread. From my perspective, it's kind of counter to the philosophy I liked in Elixir. I don't want to "derive" things based on a definition, for the most part. Elixir tends to avoid codegen and macros as much as possible, and José has recommended that if there _are_ macros, they should be a very light layer over calling functions, which should be the primary interface.

All this is said without having tried Ash, so I could be way off base. But I've been mostly ignoring it and wondering if I'll have to actually use it someday, and then be back in Rails-y magic land. I also use Scala at work, and saw how a philosophical split in the community just kind of trashed the language (from my perspective). It used to be a cool, better Java, but then those dang Haskell type astronauts found it and made everything impossible to understand.

Just taking the automatic Authentication, for example: Phoenix settled on a `mix` generator for it, to actually put the code and logic into the app itself. This is surely informed from José's years of experience maintaining Devise. If the best those two could come up with is a code generator, then I'm skeptical whatever Ash does here will be better. It feels like it's just heading right back to Devise land. And that was a successful place, and Rails and all its gems are still around, but that's kind of the "old world" philosophy and again doesn't square with us old Elixir developers who were Rails refugees.

I came to Elixir from PHP/Laravel so I approached Ash with a similar skepticism. I was looking specifically for a set of tools that would allow me to rebuild an ancient and unwieldy ColdFusion SAAS product, as a solo dev, with maximum stability and minimum boilerplate. I landed on Elixir+Ash after about a year of exploring other ecosystems and languages.

If you look under the hood of Ash's macros, they're all just shorthand for creating a particular struct with sensible defaults. It's not actually doing a ton of magic. You can replace them entirely with direct function calls, or probably even manually declare the structs yourself.

If there's magic, it tends to be more in the execution step - like how `Ash.read()` can push authorization logic into the query/db layer. But that's exactly the kind of logic I don't want to have to write myself over and over again.

I have never compared Phoenix's generated auth stuff to Ash's so I can't speak to that. However I can say Ash's generators all use `igniter`, which is part of the Ash project. It allows for package developers to reach into Elixir's AST to make smarter installers/updaters, and is being adopted more broadly throughout the Elixir ecosystem. So in terms of code generation Ash's approach is gaining a lot of traction.

Speaking for myself here, I've really liked working with Ash. The value becomes more apparent the more I use it.

Ash, while magic, is mostly a thin layer over calling functions. Often with a lot of ways to go deep down (let's say, by calling ecto functions yourself).

But I do understand you feeling. E.g. I myself have stayed away from things like AshAuth and Ash Forms for now

This is the beauty of Elixir's macros. For a lot of libraries, they are usually just calls to an underlying function with the same name. Because of Elixir's functional style and immutability, it makes it much easier to read through the magic compared to macros in other languages.

That being said, I don't have any hands-on experience with Ash so I can't speak for its approach to macros. I do think Zach's work in the community with Ash/Igniter is something to be applauded for. I'm currently working in a Python codebase that lacks conventions and would kill for something like Ash that provides consistent design patterns.

We support both Rails and Phoenix at Honeybadger.io (APM/error tracking), and I tend to personally prefer the more declarative/less-magic approach. We're still a Rails monolith primarily but have run Elixir services in production and are fans. We're just getting started on building some observability stuff for Ash, will be interesting to see how it compares.

>> All this is said without having tried Ash, so I could be way off base.

You nailed it. "Magic" is actually a good way to describe it, because much of the developer experience with Ash revolves around figuring out the exact incantation you need to use to make it do what you're trying to do, and the correct intonation and the right amount of reagents.

you can appreciate though how if you are building multiple projects for multiple clients, you'll eventually know all the incantations and it's worth it for your business domain.

> born from Rails devs who were tired of Rails magic

One thing I learned is that we're all different. To me, the magic of Rails is absolutely bonkers, unintuitive, and unmanagable. I also can't work without static types anymore. DHH is apparently my arch nemesis in these regards? Yet I can't definitively say it's because he's inherently flawed.

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