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Discussion on: I am the author of Elm in Action. Ask Me Anything!

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_joshburgess profile image
Josh Burgess 🤔

Can you describe your experience with Elixir/Erlang/OTP so far? Do you have a rough estimate of the ratio of Ruby to Elixir being used for the backend @ NoRedInk? Do you see the company moving more and more of the backend to Elixir in the future?

Thanks,
-Josh

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Richard Feldman

Elixir is super new for us, so the back-end is still almost exclusively Ruby.

We have one Elixir service in production right now, and it's not user-facing. We are currently working on our first (small) user-facing Elixir service, and once that's done, we plan to start working on a third (much larger and more mission-critical) user-facing Elixir service. A ballpark timeline for that third one would be getting it into production six months from now.

Our approach is generally to use new technology when we expect a specific benefit, not just because it's enjoyable. (Although it is certainly enjoyable!) So to the extent that we keep finding ways that doing more Elixir will benefit our code base, we'll keep doing more of it, but we're not going out of our way to rewrite Ruby code in Elixir without a tangible benefit in mind.