Mental bridge from Ruby to Elixir?

…ideally up to the point where people would look at a problem and think “Rails would be overkill for this”

^ I like where this thread is going Elixir Recipes could be some sort of community-driven Wiki maybe.. Or at least a blog post.

Thank you everybody!

Well, I’ve already submitted one other talk proposal already for the upcoming ElixirConf.EU… so I did the obvious thing and submitted this one as well. It’s a long wait until the selection so I just have to forget about it until then

I’m not that crazy… yet

(BTW, it might not show in this post but I’m having a “celebrities talked to me” moment here )

Honestly, I could imagine that turning into some sort of “Elixir Recipes” book if you took it to the next level.

I think this is a wonderful idea!

Many of us try to promote Elixir by talking about more complex scenarios such as massive scalability, fault-tolerance, and high availability. I believe that this leaves many people with a feeling that Elixir is an overkill for their smaller-scale problems.

Having a talk which showcases how in simple scenarios you can do a bunch of things with Elixir alone, without needing to reach for external products, might help people understand that Elixir is not only made for large-scale systems, but can also do wonders for smaller ones.

This is precisely why I feel that Elixir is a win-win technology. It leads to simple solutions for simple problems, yet at the same time it can take us far, so we don’t have to consider swapping it for something else down the line.

You should totally submit such talk, and I hope I’ll be there to see it live

This 1000 times. I’m working on very small scale projects that run on a single machine. Not having to install a ton of packages for common functionality is a huge boon. In fact I’m thinking of collecting all this philosophy into a talk for some next ElixirConf… my working title is “Scaling down with Elixir”.

Yes, my position is that for simpler projects Elixir will help simplifying the tech-stack. So while I see occasional complaints that Elixir is an overkill for smaller projects, I personally think that with Elixir we’ll produce simpler solutions for simple problems, and at the same time we’re certain it can take us very far if things become more complex.

This is a crucial piece of info, thanks for that!

Fully understood! 80/20. I was interested in those 80% of use cases here

Thanks everyone! This is really about “practical recipes”. I typically work with early stage startups where for 90% of use cases you’re good to go with out-of-the-box rails + postgres, and sometimes maybe a bit of sidekicq and redis cache, based on “premature optimization is the root of all evil” principle. I’ve been even told that Elixir is ‘premature optimization’ once

So I’m really looking for best practices for common problems that keep repeating in the usual clones of instagram / snapchat / foursquare / tinder with thousands of users, not millions. It appears to me that Elixir ecosystem could actually let you focus on the core of your business, rather than waste your time on convoluted setups and caching strategies..

Thanks again, this is a great community!

I think others have answered your specific questions, but I’d just like to address a more general point, since this table tends to be misinterpreted in a couple of ways.

It’s worth mentioning that this table is a true story, not a contrived example. I was working on these things side-by-side, and Server B was implemented in plain Erlang, as a single project. Moreover, having been involved in server A from the very start, there was no doubt in my mind that we could have moved most (if not all) of it to Erlang. In fact, since we had a lot of problems in production with server A (unlike server B which had almost no problems), I proposed we move it gradually to Erlang, and argued that this move will solve many of our problems. Reflecting back, I still feel the same.

I however caution against a general conclusion that Erlang can always replace 3rd party products. In more complex cases, an external component will likely be a better choice than a built-in Erlang option. That said, Erlang tools (such as processes or ETS tables) can definitely handle many different scenarios, so my feeling is that compared to other languages (especially scripting languages with no proper concurrency story), an Erlang (or Elixir) based project will in general require less 3rd party products and external OS processes.

Yes, for larger binaries this can still happen, so the advice on using :binary.copy/1 on data that you plan to store for a long time still applies. But it’s harder to hit this issue than it was before.