The community seems stronger than ever. What was your experience of its fading away like? Projects like this don’t give the impression of a language falling by the wayside. People tend to fall in love with Elixir. You never forget falling in love.
might be just that core elixir is pretty stable. I haven't consulted the elixir forums in months because I rarely run into issues that require external help. I write elixir every day though. Would love to see more people get into elixir though for when we start hiring more people.
The most recent StackOverflow poll shows Elixir as having the highest percentage of people happy with working with it (over 70%), taking top spots among all tech languages and platforms … and is among the lowest for tech people wish they are using for work, but are not.
In other words, many of the developers who want to be working with Elixir are working with Elixir, and are quite happy doing so.
What drives great web framework is a culture of making product. RoR and PHP based frameworks have massive product makers, thus it drives forces into libraries made for variety of products.
Elixir's culture is engineering-ish. So you will see decent libs that deal with weird mechanism stuff, but lack of vibe and forces driven from business needs.
This is very true. the ecosystem has astounding next gen tooling for solving all sorts of things easily that are real bugbears in other languages (oban, horde, genstage, numbat) but the libraries for interfacing with actual third party services or doing mundane things are a bit lacking.
Its the reason I tell startups to use laravel or node instead even though I built my startup in elixir. Yes its a huge advantage for what we do (realtime synced apps for managing restaurants) but its overkill for most saas products that are just glorified crud apps. laravel is a huge winner there with its library of prebuilt apps that handle user authentication, billing, tenancy as drop in components.
There's plenty of example. Stripity stripe is an example of one of the better integrated examples and even I've been a bit frustrated with it at times. We're currently stuck on a slightly older version and last I checked, it didn't support the latest version of the stripe API. And that's an example of a library thats relatively well maintained. If you want to use authorize.net for instance, you have to roll your own. (there's a hex package but its still very much in beta). If you wanted to do banking and use Synapsefi, be prepared to roll your own.
Now it wouldn't' be any harder to write these libraries in elixir vs ruby or laravel. The difference is there are well polished libraries for both those platforms you can just drop in and use. That makes what could be a week of work in elixir, about half a day in ruby by virtue of the work largely being done for you already.
If the library doesn't exist for either, then I agree, elixir isn't going to be any harder to integrate.
Datadog APM, Segment: both key to building day to day products, none first party support. Community libraries exist, but their bus factor isn’t looking good.
That hasn’t been my experience at all. ElixirConf was well attended this year and regional conferences are coming back. The Slack is active. Most of the podcasts are still running.
Elixir was one of the few languages I saw in companies (albeit, infrequently) that wasn't like Java, C#, Python, or JS (Scala here and there). Was always curious about it as perhaps something that could be reasonably pitched as having some nominal uptake.
Pure anecdata there also. Literally just ones I have personally seen on clients or heard about from coworkers.
We use it at a large company and employ almost 60 people writing it. It’s been great so far. The talent pool is really good and it’s easy to teach to junior devs.
Interesting, I was thinking the opposite. Elixir Forum has so much volume I stopped following it 1-2 years ago and now hang out in the much quieter Erlang Forum :D
I hope this project sparks some renewed interest in Elixir!
(That said, the linked site has basically zero information or examples)