So a little background. I’m responsible for maintaining a number of legacy systems written in old languages (Dibol, Visual Foxpro) so I have very little experience with the web or functional programming. My company is upgrading to PHP and Laravel and I’ve been using some of the community resources to learn these technologies. Let me say that Laravel is a great framework and the community is unbelievably vibrant and productive. However, working my way through the tutorials for Laravel I would often hit a dead-end where some mistyped line would cause an error. And the errors in Laravel and PHP are daunting for a beginner. Programming in PHP, Laravel and Eloquent is a complex endeavour as dealing with the object hierarchy has caused me a lot of pain.
My experience with Elixir, Phoenix and Ecto using the Phoenix in Action book has been a breeze in contrast. Things are simple straight forward and they work! I am a very average programmer, but so far, I love the Elixir experience. I will have to go back into the Laravel world eventually but this is fun!