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Comment by mrcwinn | Hacker News Reader

Worried it might fall behind… further? I love LiveView, Phoenix, Elixir, OTP. But the ecosystem is a wasteland of abandoned packages.

If Phoenix.new helps solve that problem, I’m all for the effort. But otherwise, the sole focus of the community leaders of Elixir should be squarely and exactly focused on creating the incentives and dynamics to grow the base.

Compare, for example, Mastra in TypeScript or PydanticAI in Python. Elixir? Nothing.

Not here to bash. It’s more just a disappointment because otherwise I think nothing comes close.

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All languages are a wasteland of abandoned packages, i.e. there is a very long tail of stuff no one has maintained for years. It’s all relative to the mindshare. For its size, Elixir is doing quite well.

It's not the long tail. It's that the HEAD of packages in Elixir are also often poorly maintained or not maintained. The fundamental question for any developer: can I be productive quickly? Despite all that Elixir has going for it, the answer is often "no."

Want a first-party client library for the service you're using? Typically the answer is "too bad, Elixir developer." And writing your own Finch or Req wrapper for their REST endpoint simply isn't a valid answer.

>For its size, Elixir is doing quite well.

I'm actually arguing the opposite. Elixir is not doing well because of its size. So how can that be influenced and changed?

What packages in Elixir have you found unmaintained/missing in the ecosystem? Genuinely curious.

Probably the highest profile and most consistent example would be Stripe. The most popular Stripe wrapper for Elixir’s docs point to a 2019 Stripe API version: https://github.com/beam-community/stripity-stripe

Worse still, the quality of Stripe’s own docs have really degraded this decade for anyone not using a language they have an SDK for. Most of their newer docs assume m have a drop-down toggle for on backend language with a few popular languages and no option for “other”. Example: https://docs.stripe.com/billing/quickstart

None of this is a fault of anyone working on Elixir or Phoenix but it definitely has an effect of discouraging some of the fledgling entrepreneur types who Elixir would otherwise be a near perfect fit for, as Rails was in the late aughts.

anything OAuth

There is an excellent (maintained, funded, audited AND with official certification) erlang/Elixir library for that: https://github.com/erlef/oidcc

I have just shipped a production service centered around OAuth and interfacing with OpenID Connect servers.

Most languages require maintenance.

Some languages—Clojure is a good example—have packages from 10 years ago, entirely unmaintained, that still work great because no maintenance is needed.

This is also true for Elixir though. A lot of "unmaintained" Elixir packages still work fine.

That's their point (I think, lol).

In my experience, Elixir is very much on that end of the spectrum as well. I'm wondering if GGP just considers packages that don't have updates for 6 months as "unmaintained" or "dead" because they come from Javascript world where everything is, well... you know.

Broken and deprecated from inception?

Fragmented, 'not developed here, and 'only I can create the one standard everyone needs'?

This is such a weird thing to say and I see it all of the time. It sucks people have been tricked into thinking a library must be updated every 2 weeks in order to still be relevant.

You think just because an author bumps the version number of a library it's somehow better than a library that is considered complete?

It boggles my mind that people actually think this way.

You must never have been a Ruby developer. “I notice this library hasn’t been updated in 8 days, is it still being maintained?”

Old packages usually still run great in Elixir though.

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