Convincing someone Elixir/Phoenix will still be thriving in 5 years

[AstonJ]

@evadne

Have you seen: https://joearms.github.io/published/2017-12-18-Calling-Elixir-From-Erlang.html

Yep but I think what people have been mentioning most is that’s not easy enough and things like not being able to use Phoenix and Ecto isn’t possible… however I recently saw a post saying that it’s not actually possible to call every Erlang library in Elixir either (which I always thought was a great selling point for Elixir)… so we definitely need more clarity and discussion on this imo.

@mindok

Hi @AstonJ - what are some examples of these?

You could probably guess… but… a social network (as well as a few smaller apps to help get aquatinted with the language and eco-system).

I actually created a social network for a specific community as one of my first Rails apps, and that’s when I first discovered I might struggle with using Ruby/Rails for the bigger SN and that experience is what started me on my quest for something else. At first that was within Ruby (Volt) but then not long after that Phoenix arrived on the scene with a lot of the benefits that Volt was offering - and then some!

@mindok

Historically I had other reasons for looking at Elixir in the first place (mostly related to how far you can get as a “one man band”), but the ease of “soft real-time” enabled by the run-time, pubsub, liveview etc have set us up for a new wave of highly interactive applications even in historically boring line of business applications.

Nice! Are any of these completed/public? If so you should definitely think about posting them in our #community:showcase section

@cnck1387

On the bright side, I went back and looked at some Elixir code I wrote almost a year ago and most of it still made sense. I was also reminded at how well designed the ok / error tuple system is with pattern matching for writing extremely readable and extensible code.

That’s awesome! I think one of the reasons people were drawn to Elixir (and Phoenix) was because of the promise of showing us a ‘better way’. In fact I still think this is something that could become part of the draw in a big way and we’ve had some discussions about some of these things in the past.