Elixir vs. Java, Ruby, and PHP - Seeking case studies or an interview with a community member

[OvermindDL1]

@Eiji

Java - I don’t worked with Java so much, but I tried it and lots of languages like it (for exxample Groovy). For me it’s much more harder to learn and develop. Simple one-line fixes with Groovy/Grails, Java-based editor and deployment (using Tomcat) was like a hell - it takes too more time and it’s not good for old computers.

Eh, don’t be that hard on Java:

• The types help ensure your program is correct, which cannot be said about Elixir (though java does not go far enough, everything can be cast to an Object like you can to void* in C, blehg)
• Tomcat is indeed hell, but don’t use it, there are much better server containers for java programs than Tomcat.

@Eiji

PHP - Easy to setup, but you need really lots of experience to secure it + you need to control your code really good. I remember true hell trying to help busy administrator in my first work. I was need to reinstall Joomla! and Wordpress sites really often and we waste lots of time on it. Also I heard about lots of security problems with PHP. It’s why in my first job we was focused on Groovy/Grails and Ruby/Rails.

Java7 is actually much faster than before and you can make good software in it now without fighting with it too much. However Joomla and Wordpress are both ‘old PHP’ things that are not made well. And with PHP it is easier to have security problems, but with enough discipline those are minimized (however yes, there are still lots of security issues with PHP, PHP7 closed more of those thankfully). It’s still faster than Ruby/Rails though.

@Eiji

Ruby - For me it was a really good step forward. Much more secure that PHP and much more faster than Groovy/Grails + Tomcat, but it’s not all we can achieve.

More secure by default is great yeah, but using PHP frameworks you get a lot of that too (if you tried to, say, re-implement Rails on Ruby you’d probably have a lot of security issues as well), but even by default Rails has a lot of security issues that are easy to fall in to unless you know to avoid them. Also Ruby/Rails is a lot slower than Groovy (no clue about Grails), and tomcat you should avoid anyway.

@Eiji

Elixir - One command mix new is just too big advantage for me to even think about return to other languages.

You get this with about any language with any decent IDE, and many languages, like Rust, do the same built-in. I think the biggest advantage of Elixir is it is built on the BEAM and instead of entirely ignoring its heritage it instead embraces it, which helps people to write proper code the first time instead of trying to figure it out (great docs for the BEAM!).

@hubertlepicki

Well, Facebook is doing well with PHP, the chances are you can actually build decent software with it now days.

Also people need to quit saying that Facebook is using PHP, because they are not.
They are using HHVM, which is PHP-like in syntax, but it has types (whoo) and is much faster and has a different API and more and more. You can run PHP on it as well (and it is still faster than normal PHP) but it is not taking full advantage of its enhanced API and without putting the Types in the source it will not run as fast as it possibly can anyway. Facebook uses HHVM, they don’t use PHP anywhere anymore.