[awesomegoat_com]

I have built my web scraping system ( https://awesomegoat.com ) on Ruby on Rails. And while I spent this Christmas-break exploring Elixir/Phoenix, I am so far staying with Ruby on Rails.

While it seems I could have built a slightly more (CPU & memory) efficient system in elixir, I am afraid the development of new features would be a bit slower and my time is more precious than the machine's.

Also, CPU & memory are likely not the constraints in the scraping exercise. What you will likely find later on that you will get blocked by Cloudflare on week 2 and superb backend won't make a difference.

[awesomegoat_com]

Today, I woke up feeling that elixir/phoenix is the best platform for rewrites.

I mean, when you know the problem domain well, you can build a master piece in elixir/phoenix. I still feel that putting together the first prototype has to be faster in ruby on rails.

[MainlyMortal]

It's quite ironic, or rather unfortunate, that recently we're seeing the opposite problem in the Elixir community.

A lot of the big famous companies used in case studies about how Elixir and Phoenix are amazing, save money, save resources, save development time etc. are starting to abandon the stack for technically worse solutions. And for no good reason other than coming from management it seems.

I agree that it's a great platform for rewrites in that once you have a working solution, and you know the bottlenecks, then you understand how to break it up to make it concurrent, parallel and distributed with minimal effort.

I also think that it's a great prototype language too, though. You can get up and running just as fast as Ruby on Rails for like 99% of projects. Or at least used to be able to. I have a rant about the last five years of Phoenix churn being responsible for the low adoption of Elixir but that's for another day.