I have to say that I can relate with the sentiment but from another perspective…
My background for the past 8 years is basically around Microsoft technologies, specifically C# and ASPNET - which is needless to say a very smooth experience on Windows.
So, I’ve been flirting with the idea of migrating to elixir since 2017 (with only recently having the opportunity of doing so). A curious thing is that at the time, I saw this as a chance to express a previous desire to migrate to Ruby (which has a very poor history with Windows) and the fact that Elixir runs on a virtual machine was one of my highest hopes to avoid the “Ruby effect”.
Following the community from distance, I have to say that was a huge shock for me because the culture was different from what I was used to (very close to Ruby’s community). It sounded too separatist for my taste in contrast with what Microsoft has beeing doing - actively advertising, encouraging and supporting development on other platforms.
Let me explain that: Microsoft’s motto is (arguably) facilitating everything for the developer (environment, tools, services, etc) and for the past 3 years or so this also translates to systems other than Windows (with .NET Core), which the community has made tremendous efforts to make it as smooth as it can be for people not working on Windows - changing the compiler, the APIs and improving the general community culture. And a great thing is that the vast majority of the community has ported, forked and worked on adapting packages to the news APIs, which is very encouraged since you have tools to do that as easily as doing it without being compatible. So, there’s that. The way I see is much more about direction and culture other than the overall degradation of experience, which is a side effect.
Overall, it’s very frustrating to have to care more about friction with the OS you’re running other than the product you want to build. Also, having people inside the community strongly encouraging you to change your OS of choice because the experience is not remotely the same - I wish we have passed that at this point with modern tools.
Beyond that, there’s nothing more infuriating than start learning a technology that supposedly is compatible with your system and than, most of the guides you see on the internet assume you’re using a NIX based system - mostly MacOs.
To be fair, Windows has it’s fair share on the whole thing, but if other communities can provide better experiences why can’t we too?
I’ve watched at least three different talks of José saying that Elixir is pretty much done and that there’s nothing else to add to the language. So, following the focus on extensibility, what about tackling this problem of fragmented user experience? A good place to start would be doing something like the Omnisharp project for Elixir.
PS.: And please, take all of I’m saying with a huge grain of salt. It’s based on my experience and I don’t mean it in a wrong way, I don’t think I’m in any place to demand work that is provided freely. But I think that it is important to give this feedback if it’s important to the community to tackle these issues.
Now, about the environment, I always recommend using Chocolatey for Windows development (almost the same as @michaelkschmidt pointed out):
choco install elixir
choco install postgresql
choco install visualstudio2019buildtools
Using vagrant, docker or WSL to be honest, it’s too much friction compared to the native experience. For me, WSL is a last resort tool.
Also talking about iex, the ugly werl GUI and console support on Windows, there’s this Powershell package called PSReadLine that I use to get better completion and history using git on Powershell with Posh-Git (it does not work with iex, but it could be a place to look at since it aims to provide a bash-like experience)
