pedrogarrett
Convincing someone Elixir/Phoenix will still be thriving in 5 years
I have a medium sized Rails web app (200K LOC, 500M db records) that will be undergoing a rewrite, and instead of writing it in Rails again, I want to use Elixir/Phoenix.
I feel confident that it’s the correct technical choice, and it’s ultimately my decision so I don’t have to convince any one else, but it will be nice to have them on board. I can easily show the technical merit, but I’ve found it harder to show that it will have staying power… (so people are concerned about future updates, packages going unmaintained, etc).
Does the fact that it dropped off of the Stack Overflow develop survey in 2020 actually mean that its interest is actually slowing? Are there metrics that would show that it’s likely to still have at least at much interest that it does now in the near, or far, future?
I’d appreciate any thoughts the community has on this. Thanks.
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gregvaughn
Elixir has never been represented well at Stackoverflow, mostly because this forum serves its purpose in the Elixir community.
Also, I saw this tweet the other day
https://twitter.com/maco_nix/status/1373390486401122304
josevalim
Agreed. I don’t think measuring success by using Rails as a stick is useful because it was really a perfect storm. The options at the time were either bureaucratic XML-driven Java web frameworks or completely unstructured PHP. Rails was truly different from everything else at the time. The agile manifesto was also released 3 years prior, starting a new discussion around software development. It is no accident that the main Rails book was “Agile web development with Rails”. Then you had a whole other front on how to better design UIs for web applications, which 37 Signals was also involved with, as well as the Getting Real book. All of those were part of the “movement” and contributed over time.
This is of course not to remove anything from Rails/DHH/Basecamp. Others could have seized the occasion but they were the ones who did it.
For those who were doing web development at the time, those ideas were a large departure from the status quo. Today we see improvements in different areas but nothing that impacted so many fronts as it happened back then. And that’s why I think expecting other things to be Rails is not productive. Case in point: if there was a community that could pull another Rails, at least in terms of size, it would be JavaScript, and we haven’t seen it either. It felt Meteor at the time could be the one but it didn’t for many reasons.
EDIT: I would also add that web development became much more complex today, at least in terms of applications/architecture/use cases. Back then, SPAs were not a thing, native was not a thing, etc. Now it is hard for something new to come out as the unquestioned champion because you will immediately find 3 other use cases it won’t shine at.
crova
Mate, Elixir just turned 10 years old.
The underlying tech is older than me and I’m already 30+ and they’re still moving forward.
NX which could open A LOT of possibilities for Elixir is fresh out of the gate.
Someone posted a bug less than 24h ago and José already patched it.
I don’t have any tangible metric to answer your question but I think you should not worry about this.
If anything, IMHO, Elixir will only be stronger in the future.
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