- What first drew you to it (how long ago!?) and what keeps you here?
The BEAM and a coworker who was a big advocate of Erlang – and was looking to use Elixir to build a large distributed system, roughly 3 years ago. I really appreciate having a “running” stateful system in the BEAM; it’s more like programming video games (what got me into programming originally).
- How have you found it has changed over the years?
I think Erlang has changed more than Elixir over the past few years. The addition of LiveView has been both exciting and terribly frustrating for me.
- How have you changed, perhaps while using it?
Writing things as pure functions whenever possible has really helped me to produce more testable and solid code. It’s interesting to me to watch as FP ideas like the ECS model are really moving heavily into game development now, producing data-oriented systems that end up producing more composable code while boosting performance.
- Which language did you come from?
Primarily C#, Java, PHP, JavaScript (NodeJS) and AS3 (a lot of multimedia and industrial systems work).
I have a love/hate relationship with it.
There are many aspects of the platform I love: the immutability, pattern matching, friendly community, the BEAM.
There are other aspects I find intensely frustrating, mostly working with Phoenix or GenStage, especially trying to find good, “best practice” examples. I often feel like the documentation is written with unstated implicitly required background knowledge. Often, I feel helpless, facing unknown unknowns that I’m unable to even begin resolving. I’ve worked in a number of languages and platforms over the last 20 or so years, and nothing has made me feel quite so on the verge of drowning as Phoenix.
- How do you think you’ll use it?
I’ve been using it in production, replicating live data in a large cluster across a series of data centers, modeling millions of users (in the “actor” sense, where people are modeled as processes) at once and upgrading code live with zero downtime.
- Which bits are you finding easy, which, not so much?
Learning FP practices and how to work with the BEAM were the largest initial hurdles.
Elixir is now very comfortable as a language for me, except for macros, which I still struggle with.
Deployment has been challenging for us, but I don’t think that’s unusual when building a large system with self-hosted servers.
Phoenix has been my largest pain point by far.
- Is there anything missing that you’d like to see included?
I think having a well-maintained set of best practice example applications would be highly beneficial to the ecosystem, especially with things in constant flux like LiveView.
I think writing the Phoenix documentation from scratch – using test developers without RoR backgrounds as guinea pigs would also be super helpful.
