Hey everyone,

Apologies in advance for this novel. Looking for some deep nugget of insight I just haven’t found after being conflicted on this for too long, really hoping someone can help!

I’ve been scouring the internet in a situation I’m hoping someone else has been in. I’m a new dev ~2/3 years and started in php. I grew to dislike the usual things about it. My choices are to invest more time into a language I don’t like (would use Laravel) or change and take the obvious upfront production hit. But I’ll be committed to my startup for years, shouldn’t I choose something I actually like? (the common wisdom seems to be “do what’s productive right now”). Most of the ideas I have either involve communication, community, project management, or e-learning. This developaralysis articles sums up my situation nicely: Code is the Cure for Developaralysis | Brightball

I mean my dream is after a few months I become super confident writing elixir code, the community flourishes, my business takes off instantly and the perfect business partner falls from the skies and we make something people want in pure joy. (haha) In fact I think likely the exact opposite will happen (probability-wise). SO:

1. Do you all think Phoenix is there in terms of productivity/learning curve for a new dev to justify going with it?

2. Is there anyone that started their project with Phoenix and regretted it = slowed them down too much? The lack of stackoverflow questions / libraries does scare me because I don’t have enough experience to confidently roll my own and I think the time it takes to do that in the first place could just mean disaster.

3. As it stands, which framework would you suggest most over Phoenix (taking into account my desire not to use PHP, but the obvious trade-offs of spending time learning a language instead of focusing on the problem domain)

4. It looks like Elixir/phoenix interest actually went down instead of up in the last year? Whereas Laravel and Django are both increasing - can anyone explain this?

-Introducing Stack Overflow Trends - Stack Overflow
-https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=%2Fm%2F0pl075p