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Discussion on: What is your opinion on Elixir language, why don't more developers use it?

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nmuta profile image
Nmuta Jones

Coming from a Ruby and Rails background, Elixir , in that community, has been considered the next best / hot thing for a while. I taught myself some basic Elixir and tinkered around with the Phoenix framework ( which uses Elixir ) and went to a few Elixir meetups in Denver.

The market niche for Elixir is that if you get really good at it, you could be able to help some teams transition from Rails onto an Elixir based stack for their back ends. This promise, however, applies only to a very small segment of the market. Many Rails shops have decided to just keep doing Rails.

I found working with Elixir to be pure joy. Not necessary as intuitive as Ruby. You certainly have to be a functional programming purist to fully appreciate the language; things that would be achieved with a simple loop in an OOP language require a totally different way of thinking.

I too LOVE the pipes. It feels elegant and clear. The main thing with Elixir for me was that it was going to force me deep into a niche that I wasn't sure I wanted to invest THAT much time into. It will never, IMO, be widely used in the dev world due to how different it is to the standard array of OOP languages. Therein lies the appeal for some people.

Phoenix and Ecto ..... I found them to be nice but nowhere near as polished and smooth of an experience as the Ruby on Rails stack. Lots of things you have to do manually that are very quick and easy with Rails.

I will always keep it in the back of my mind as something to come back to if the time comes.

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wolfiton profile image
wolfiton

Interesting view, thanks for sharing how others feel about it and why it hasn't made it's mark yet.

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bjorngrunde profile image
Björn Grunde

As an old Ruby dev myself, I wanna say you are on point. But with the Phoenix framework and rails, I disagree a bit. They use two very different approaches, were Rails contains a lot more "magic" and to figure out what's actually going on could take some time.

Phoenix is very explicit, with very little magic, as intended, to make it more clear for the developers. The upside is a better understanding on what's going on, the downside is as you say, a little bit more work for the dev.