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Yep! I was actually the sole dev working on it, both server- and client-side. I'm working on a post for our public dev blog talking about why I chose Elixir and what my experience has been. It'll eventually be available here:

https://developer.x-plane.com/blog/

I don't say this to dismiss your experience, but just to share a counterexample:

I found Elixir extremely easy to learn (despite having no Ruby experience, nor any significant experience in any functional languages). I went through the (excellent) official tutorial in a couple days, skimmed parts of Saša Juric's book, and felt reasonably confident diving in to actually writing code. Within a couple weeks I felt like I "got" OTP and idiomatic Elixir.

I do agree that, at least for somebody who uses Intellij IDEs exclusively, the lack of good first-party support sucks. I do most of my debugging via unit tests and "printf" because the Intellij Elixir plugin's interpreted mode is just too slow for the debugger to be useful to me.

Happy Elixir user here. At work we have a use case that isn't covered by José's high-level overview of the domains Elixir's used in: we run a massive multiplayer game server on it.

This is actually a really good fit. (It kind of rhymes with the original use of Erlang, being telecoms infrastructure.) We get outstanding concurrency support, high reliability, and really efficient development times. I can't imagine shipping this feature with a server written in C++ (the language I'm most comfortable in), and I can't imagine scaling it the way we need to if we'd gone for a traditional web language like Node, PHP, etc.

If you're interested, you can see the RakNet (game networking protocol) implementation we use on the server here:

https://github.com/X-Plane/elixir-raknet

The README gives a good overview of the full MMO server's architecture, too: each client connection is a stateful Elixir process (not to be confused with a heavy-weight OS process!), acting asynchronously on a client state struct; clients then asynchronously schedule themselves to send updates back to the user.

OP here. I wrote this up as an easy-to-share resource for my friends. It's incredible to me that in 2021, I still have people say things like "my computer died, how do I recover years worth of photos?". Most people don't think about this stuff until they lose everything. :(

This talk is what persuaded me to choose Elixir for our MMO game server. Best technical decision I’ve ever made. Saša Jurić’s book on Elixir is also great (although not strictly necessary considering how amazing the official Elixir intro tutorials are).

At some point I could imagine going subscription/IAP for new major features, and just grandfathering in all the people who bought it previously. But in my specific case, the app is a side project that honestly needs a lot of love, and it’s hard for me to imagine hitting up existing users for more money.

Yup. From my perspective, this is a feature, not a bug.

More than the 3.5% that Stripe or whatever would charge, less than the 15% Apple charges. :)

As a developer, assuming your app isn’t doing stuff not supported in sandbox mode, it’s as easy as a checkbox. As a user, Catalina’s absurd barrage of dialogs asking for your permission for an app to so much as look at your data may be annoying, but the dialogs are at least potentially effective. (For instance, I’ve disallowed Dropbox from touching anything outside its folder—despite it trying to access everything.)

Eh, I toe the line as far as policy is concerned. I'm not worried, personally.

Indeed! In this case, Unbound is Mac only, and probably will remain so for its entire life.

As I understand it, if you make $1 more than $1M, it's not that you suddenly owe an extra $150k in "back taxes," but rather that going forward, you'll be in the 30% "tax bracket." It's still a tax cliff, and therefore kind of problematic (if it's November 2021 and you've made $950k, you're strongly incentivized to shut down sales until the new year!), but as you say, that's a problem 99% of devs would love to have.

Huh. Cool! As I said elsewhere in the thread, my personal intuition is that Apple is a significantly better steward of my information (and credit card!) than a random small-time dev on the internet, but I realize not everyone agrees.

Is the implication that I, a random guy across the internet, am a better steward of your personally identifying information than Apple? I'm not saying you're wrong, but that definitely doesn't match my own intuitions.

Sweet! Give me a shout if you run into issues. :)

There are fives of lattes per month to be made in this market, it's blowing up! ;)

Out of curiosity, do you buy software from small devs at all? It seems like, whatever the privacy/security implications may be when buying via Apple, they're worse when dealing with a totally unknown party.

OP here, happy to answer any questions. I know Apple gets a lot of well-deserved flack, but for a small-time dev like me, them taking a 15% cut makes things a lot simpler for me.

If someone would like to arrange a back-alley cash deal, I'm happy to provide a binary on a CD-ROM. But if I'm accepting money over the internet, a third party is necessarily going to be involved, because I'm not a bank and I can't process payments myself.

It's kind of a bizarre criticism to say that Mac software is sold via the Mac App Store...

Theoretically in the developer's privacy policy. In practice, nowhere.

Nnnnnope. If you opt to purchase it via the Mac App Store, that's between you & Apple—it happens entirely apart from the app.

Proud developer of a "Data Not Collected" app here. Makes writing a privacy policy simple! :D https://www.unboundapp.com/privacy-policy.html

> . . . like going to a restaurant, getting massive food poisoning, almost dying, ending up with a $150,000 hospital bill and then the restaurant emails you with "Dear valued customer, we're sorry for the inconvenience and have decided to award you a $50 gift card for any of our restaurants, thanks!".

It's even slightly worse than that. SLAs generally refund you for the prorated portion of your monthly fee the service was out, so it's more like "here's a gift card for the exact value of the single dish we've determined caused your food poisoning." Hehe.

It's not just "ARM is fast," though—Apple's ARM chips in particular beat the pants off their ARM competitors. (See benchmarks of any iPhone compared to flagship Android devices.) I don't think you should expect similar levels of performance from a run-of-the-mill ARM chip on the desktop (though I'm happy to be shown benchmarks to the contrary).

Not sure why you're getting downvoted. It is absolutely the case that COVID should make us think very hard about how lucky we got this time. There's no reason to think this couldn't have happened with a virus 10 or 100x as deadly. Given many countries' poor performance containing it, I shudder to think what the next pandemic might look like.

I'm excited for the dict merge operator.

    >>> d = {'spam': 1, 'eggs': 2, 'cheese': 3}
    >>> e = {'cheese': 'cheddar', 'aardvark': 'Ethel'}
    >>> d | e
    {'spam': 1, 'eggs': 2, 'cheese': 'cheddar', 'aardvark': 'Ethel'}
    >>> e | d
    {'aardvark': 'Ethel', 'spam': 1, 'eggs': 2, 'cheese': 3}

If you'd like a secular guide to experiencing this yourself, for my money, Sam Harris's Waking Up app is the best way to do it. It takes quite awhile to build up the mental toolset to get there, but it's very much worth it.

https://www.wakingup.com

Background: https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/22/nyt-is-threatening-my-...

> First, I’m a psychiatrist, and psychiatrists are kind of obsessive about preventing their patients from knowing anything about who they are outside of work. You can read more about this in this Scientific American article – and remember that the last psychiatrist blogger to get doxxed abandoned his blog too. I am not one of the big sticklers on this, but I’m more of a stickler than “let the New York Times tell my patients where they can find my personal blog”.

This strategy has saved our bacon at work more than a handful of times. All the URLs we ship in our apps point to a "lookup" server (just Nginx with a huge list of redirect rules), such that if the URL we were using in the app disappears, we can change it on the server side rather than requiring a client update.

It’s the only language I’ve used where just going step by step through the official docs was enough to pick up the language. Took me maybe a day and a half.