The claim that monoliths are always better than microservices probably would not withstand close scrutiny. As the Simon and Garfunkel eulogy to Frank Lloyd Wright might have gone if Art had studied Computer Science: Software architectures may come and software architectures may go and never change your point of view. Nevertheless there are enduring principles of good software design: modularity, loose coupling and functional programming. I would suggest that the sources cited in this thread are about application of these principles rather than microservices per se. Erlang and the OTP, if not Elixir and Phoenix, were around long before microservices became fashionable. And all four will no doubt see out numerous future architectural trends.
datadrover
Fl4m3Ph03n1x
Ahh, to be honest I was not expecting this answer at all. It does make total sense to me and I think it pretty much sums up this discussion.
First of all, thank you for your POV once again. Your posts are gold mines, which I cherish.
Now, I have seen this problem so many times. You would be surprised about all the discussions I had with people telling me I should teach my Juniors jQuery before teaching them JavaScript. If you think this approach is fine (teaching library or framework X before the language they use) then… I will agree to disagree with you 
Story of my life
All my life I have used libraries and frameworks as an integral part of my apps. This means tight coupling. My seniors and everyone I knew always gave me directions to do so.
- Building an app in PHP? You better use that framework X and build your app around it.
- Doing feature Y? Just got o NPM and check for a module that does it so you can install it directly into your app.
- Are you making a MEAN app? Well, think about how you can use Angular and then make your app based on it.
By now some of you may be having heart attacks, but this was how I was taught to do software development in the industry. Needless to say, that once I started reading about lose coupling, functional programming and later on the actor model I didn’t do that well.
In more than one occasion I had a boss fighting with me because I was thinking on how to make a app decoupled and scalable instead of coding in Angular (or insert framework X here) first.
So, when I read Uncle Bob’s article, I knew right on it made sense to me. But I also knew that simply asking this very same question was going to trigger some people. Or so I thought.
I never imagined, in my wildest dreams, to see a community agree that one of the major frameworks in the language is not the holy grail of salvation. I expected people to defend Phoenix with their teeth.
Which is why I addressed this expectation at the very beginning of my post. For those of you know know me, you will find a pattern quite common in my posts where I tend to diffuse tense situations via humour, like I tried here. It doesn’t always work and I am not saying it is always the best approach, but when talking about topics I see as being polemic (such as, do we really need framework X) I find humour to be a good tool (even if poorly used by me).
Needless to say, I am really surprised by the level of maturity int he community. It’s like everyone here has read the Clean Code blog or at least knows who uncle Bob is, which is something I never found in any other community.
Thank you everyone for all your replies. I don’t have time to reply to everyone but I am grateful for all your quality content.
Truth is, now I am thinking about buying @lance 's book and investigating Phoenix
peerreynders
I’m not exactly sure how I could have left you with that impression. I value knowledge and skill in relation to it’s half-life. Framework skills have a pretty short half-life, usually much shorter than the language it’s written in (knowing how to build an application or feature specific framework is more useful).
Personally I often resent the opportunity cost that learning a batteries-included framework imposes because sometimes the details it tries to protect me from would actually be helpful in creating a better mental model of what is actually going on.
The advice to use a framework usually comes from a “productivity” perspective - i.e. don’t get delayed by re-inventing the wheel (incorrectly). However using frameworks also move software development from a problem solving/design activity more towards a manufacturing activity.
And then there are times where: Productive is a massive red herring
As to my attitude towards jQuery - here.
Fl4m3Ph03n1x
You didn’t left me with that impression. I just felt that your post provided a good excuse to share some personal war stories of mine and the point of my reply was to simply say one thing: I completely agree with everything you said.
nsweeting
If a project is at any point going to be worked on by people other that yourself, I would argue that something like phoenix is actually quite important. It allows someone to come into something already familiar with the basics. Unless you’re prepared to create documentation for your vision of how something should be structured at the level that phoenix or other frameworks are - it seems silly to go any other way.
mikemccall
Agree with this. Yes, the community needs phoenix. I feel every community needs a web framework. Phoenix falls into the work smarter not harder category. I would seriously question an individual who would choose to roll their own over using phoenix for a web project. Swift community has been “deciding” on a web framework for a while. Rust has https://www.arewewebyet.org/. In the last 5 years I have never worked on a single project that didn’t deal with the web. I came to elixir through phoenix. Chis stepped up and hit it out of the park for the elixir community with phoenix. I go to the local meetup and I praise elixir/phoenix. I tell beginners (and whoever else will listen) they should adopt elixir and phoenix. They come here and see some clickbait questioning a large piece of the elixir adoption story. I’m not a fan of it.
lance
Glad to hear that you’re interested in the book @Fl4m3Ph03n1x! If you do decide to buy it, please let us know what you think. 
lessless
Using a framework is not an excuse for not having a software architecture done right. There are few books that get that pretty straight.
Nicd
I would seriously question an individual who always used Phoenix for a web project, since many simple projects do not need it (I have several). But I do agree that for a project with many different needs (templating, API, DB, channels) Phoenix is very useful as it provides all that out of the box and a structure to follow.
outlog
There is also economization of learning/maintaining a skillset - and risk of a project progression - which favors using a single does-it-all framework - especially when it comes to a “lean” one like phoenix..
eg I would love to have the time to fire up something like Raxx/Ace(or no framework) for a hypothetical smaller/narrower project - but then I need extra time to learn the ins-and-outs, and what about when that project progresses to be more complex, and what about updating/maintaining said solution..
so lack of time/limited brain space is (unfortunately) also a factor.. I do use umbrella so by all means phoenix is simply the web interface to the “real” apps..