Its hard for me to believe people think Elixir isn’t different enough to matter, I think all of 2 days with it convinced me I needed to unlearn several things, and once I did, that it was a new, wonderful and different language.

I can see that argument applied to phoenix, but I also think its a good thing. The surface similarities run a bit deeper, though I think just because its also basically following the MVC pattern. But as Chris McCord has said, you don’t end up with a phoenix app, you end up with an app that happens to use phoenix, and I believe that matters.

Even without channels, I’d be interested in Phoenix for the performance over Rails. With channels, it seems likely there is little I’d want to do with a webapp that it can’t do, and do well. Regarding auth, even will channels, I’m seeing a lot of mobile app based tooling that prefers JWT anyway, so I don’t think that and channels are mutually exclusive.

A strong appeal of Phoenix for me is the familiarity. There are enough Rails touch points that I don’t feel overwhelmed. It also helps that many of the differences in Phoenix address areas of Rails that I perceived as weaknesses.