alienfunk

We use Elixir as the backend for a lot of services that need reliability and performance in healthcare specifically on the pharmacy side. One such use case is pricing medications at the point of prescribing to enable conversations between a provider and a patient.

My experience with Elixir has largely been the same, to be honest. I’ve managed to speak with lots of well known library authors just by messaging them on the elixir slack. The creators of the language and the dominant web framework, Jose Valim and Chris McCord respectively, are well known for popping in on threads, conversations, and GitHub issues all over the place.

Elixir libraries are also pleasantly backwards compatible in my experience (with the occasional exception to be sure). At my company the effort required to maintain currency has been 1/10 that of Ruby in my experience.

I frequently hear that elixir lacks the 3rd party library support of Ruby. If you use sheer quantity as the criteria, then definitely, but in the 6 years I’ve been using Elixir, this has interestingly never gotten in my way. I’ve always either been able to find a library or the problem simply isn’t gnarly enough to deserve a library. Maybe I just haven’t picked the right problems with which to experience this lack though :).

All that to say I think Elixir and Clojure are very similar in these regards!

I know that PagerDuty also uses Elixir for some of their backend services. See https://www.pagerduty.com/blog/elixir-at-pagerduty/