Is anyone finding it difficult learning Elixir or Phoenix?

I came from Go (3 years) to Elixir and before that I was doing .NET (C#/F#) for about 14 years. It has been almost 3 years since I use Elixir on and off (mostly R&D and personal projects - only one real world) and I (think) understand most of it and most of Phoenix, well enough.

Now (hopefully) I am going to write Elixir on a daily basis. Still I do not feel comfortable enough using Elixir or Phoenix . I want to achieve more and be more productive yet I feel I lag - sometimes unpleasantly. One feeling that I have is that the language and the framework (both of them) change too much. I really hope they slow down a bit and get more stable.

It is hard to pinpoint the problem. But I know I love Elixir very much and a good community have my back.

Thanks!

Coming from an OOP background like me (C#, PHP and Python), I think the problem to make the transition isn’t Elixir but getting your head around functional programming and thinking differently. Elixir is so simple once you understand the concepts of functional programming.

If I had to start over again, I’d love to work with some functional language. Learning design patterns, understand all things related to classes, objects, interfaces and so on, is the most scary thing.

At the beginning understanding all the FP concepts, right now I’m trying to understand better concurrent systems, still a complex topic for me at least since there’s a lot of things to take in mind and there’s not a lot of resources, you don’t see it too much when developing Phoenix web apps, but when you do another kind of projects you need to reason about those things and there’s quite hard to get the right solution for what you’re looking for

An amazing journey so far, Elixir is an amazing language

What I’ve found challenging at the beginning:

• rebinding variables (are they unmutable and mutable?)
• pattern matching with pin operator
• why can’t I match on functions
• in Phoenix - the similar syntax for module attributes and EEx assigns; that drove me crazy

Elixir is easy to learn. Phoenix is a little hard, framework is always hard.

Is there some simple enough tutorial?

Elixir and Phoenix weren’t that difficult to figure out, even for someone without a lot of prior experience. What really held me back was the lack of knowledge about everything else (e.g how to use relational databases). Even now the most challenging part of building applications with phoenix isn’t phoenix, it’s the front end, especially anything having to do with asynchronous JavaScript (which I still suck at).

It’s kind of why I love Drab and try to plug it in everywhere I can. It just solves so many of the problems that I would have had to use JavaScript for otherwise.

I started my professional development career in elixir. So every thing was new to me . The thing I found most difficult was finding appropriate help for problems. Now here on elixir forum community is good. There are fewer libraries and most of the time we have to implement basic features from scratch. So I think community needs to focus more on this. But over all I think elixir and phoenix both are good. Different from other web dev languages. Only boundary is your imagination

Just out of curiosity what are some libraries that you think are missing?

I found some parts of Phoenix a bit slippery at first, mainly the stuff written in macros, since it tended to make things a bit less explicit to me.

I just accepted this as working within a framework, and tried to focus on learning the common idioms used in it, but kinda lacked a deeper understanding the underlying mechanisms and why things were organized the way they were.

But, after listening to a couple of talks by Chris McCord, things finally made sense!

It’s not very difficult, but I wish there were more detailed tutorials that keep in mind that there are beginners. Sometimes I feel sad that a great language and framework such as elixir and phoenix aren’t attracting much more people than the current pace… But it must be that I am too impatient. ^^

One challenge that I will face very soon is the deployment of my first Elixir/Phoenix project… I gathered a lot of tutorials for the matter that will help but it sounds not very very easy to achieve a deployment… But I remain optimistic.
I would like to use cowboy with haproxy for serving my app since I read somewhere that it is what you’ve done for this forum application. I found a tutorial so if I have any problem deploying, I’ll end back probably for asking help.

If someone have any elixir/phoenix app deployment suggestions for me, please feel free to make them.

For the libraries I missed, I will say an all in one authentication designed for newbies. ^^
Now I’m using Phauxth for my project. It doesn’t implement things like Facebook authentication, but It is very light and easy for understanding for even a newbie.

I would like also to have a smart migration generator library. What I mean ? For example if I want to add a new column to a table, I just have to edit a model file and the right migration file will be generated by running some command. This way all definitions of the same table fields will always appear in the same place. But this is just a whim I guess. ^^