Elixir vs Ruby on Rails

That is essentially correct, although Phoenix is a lot less of a monolithic framework than rails.

This is definitely wrong. Elixir is a programming language, not a web framework. It doesn’t contain a web framework at all.

I think it’s just the syntax. People see Elixir’s syntax, they see the Ruby influence, and they jump to the conclusion that Elixir “Rubified” Erlang. This is simply not true. Elixir is a function language with immutable data and 0 overhead with respect to the equivalent Erlang, equivalent code compiles to equivalent byte code.

This is all exactly what I thought. Is there some sort of sharable article? My search-engine-foo is not producing results

This is probably the best short presentation for explaining the ecosystem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvBT4XBdoUE - Phoenix is used to provide an easy way to interact with the system, but I would be surprised if your colleagues are still equating Elixir with Rails after watching this

Saša is awesome. He’s one of the reasons why I was excited to learn Elixir (that video included) thanks for bringing it up

Yep - I don’t watch many movies more than once, but I’ve watched this talk a few times!

Consequently, I was watching this (again) today. I would also recommend the first three paragraphs of the preface of Elixir in Action, also by Saša Jurić.

If someone says this, the problem is psychological, not technical. They are labeling something to deliberately attach some known bad connotations and they are priming others to feel bad upfront – and likely be driven by confirmation bias when looking into it.

This is most likely deliberate, because people generally hate changes of status quo. It’s rather natural defensive mechanism, doesn’t necessarily mean that they are “bad people”.

Try to go via their ego, carefully indirectly question their ability to apply critical thinking on this.. Make sure not to attack anyone directly. Raise a rhetorical question “I wonder if we have anyone in the team that would be able to filter out all our biases and perform independent analysis…”. You plant a bug and some folks will step up

what makes phoenix a lot less monolithic framework than rails? Genuinenly curious

Well, actually there is httpd in OTP.

Rails is framework that is actually built from few libraries:

• ActiveSupport
• ActiveModel and ActiveRecord
• ActionView
• ActionPack

Other parts are helper modules for different aspects and do not really need to be included. In fact even ActiveModel and ActiveRecord aren’t really required parts.

So there is few tightly connected libraries that cannot live without each other (especially almost everything rely on ActiveSupport).

On the other hand Phoenix is just a helper library for Plug with few macros for simpler routing definitions and sockets handling, other than that there is really nothing “big” in it. Even the storage layer - Ecto - is completely independent, and while there are some people working on both, the projects aren’t related to each other in any way. For example most controllers in phoenix can be simplified to:

defmodule MyApp.Controllers.Foo do
  @behaviour Plug

  @impl true
  def init(opts), do: opts

  @impl true
  def call(%Plug.Conn{params: params} = conn, _opts) do
    action = Phoenix.Controller.action_name(conn)
    apply(__MODULE__, action, [conn, params])
  end

  # … 
end

Of course it is very simplified as there is few more things like setting default layout and view or calling Plugs defined within the controller, but very simple version of controller can look like that and for Phoenix there will be no difference, as there in reality is no more magic.

This also means in most places you can easily mix and match between low level plugs and the a bit more high level code of a phoenix project.