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kybishop | 8 months ago

After programming with elixir and phoenix for a few years (with many prior years of rails experience) I have a hard time seeing why one would choose rails.

Elixir is more performant, has compiler safety guarantees that are only getting better as types are introduced, is actually designed from the ground up for web dev (being based on the Erlang VM), and... it's just way more fun (subjective I know). Elixir is what I always wished Ruby was, and I couldn't be more excited about the coming type inference.

Programming with Elixir makes me feel like Ruby is a previous generation language, much like Ruby made me feel that way about Cobol or Fortran, it really is that stark.

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demosthanos|8 months ago

> is actually designed from the ground up for web dev (being based on the Erlang VM)

Nit: this makes it sounds like the BEAM was designed for web dev, which it was not. Erlang came out of Ericsson and was built for telecoms (OTP stands for Open Telecom Platform), which is where its unique set of trade-offs comes from. Many of those trade-offs make a ton of sense for web but that's not because it was designed for web, it's because there's overlap between the fields.

One way to see the difference between telecoms and web is to ask yourself when was the last time that you were working on a project with an availability SLA of 9 nines (1/3 of a second of downtime per year) or even 6 nines (32s per year). Some web dev has that, but most doesn't come close, and if that's not you then Erlang wasn't built for you (though you may still find you like it for other reasons!).

kybishop|8 months ago

Very true it is actually designed for telecoms, but like you mentioned the distinction is so small it's not really even a stretch to say it is purpose built with at least the general architecture of web in mind.

sanswork|8 months ago

I switched fully to elixir close to a decade ago now and library availability is still lagging. For pretty much any company I can be pretty sure there will be JS/Ruby/Python/C#/Java integrations/libraries and occasionally you'll find one for elixir maintained by someone that stopped responding to github issues 3 years ago.

It's definitely better but I can definitely see why you'd still choose rails these days.

kybishop|8 months ago

I agree with this sentiment, though in practice it doesn't seem to be much of an issue the vast majority of the time. Sometimes you do need that niche library though, and end up forking and updating for your needs.

Given how rarely this comes up it feels like a tolerable problem that will only diminish as Elixir adoption continues to increase; I am aware of many rail shops that are slowly and quietly switching everything to Elixir, and it feels like that snowball continues to pick up pace as Elixir improves and those libraries are created.

princevegeta89|8 months ago

I have a very extensive experience with both Ruby on Rails and Elixir/Phoenix. Also ended up building large full-stack apps on either framework.

In the beginning when Ruby on Rails said hello to me, I instantly fell in love with it and the simplicity and the natural semantics that flow with it. It was absurdly easy to write new features and ship them to production. As the codebase grew and the team grew we started running into situations where APIs broke, or to trace the workflow of things in terms of finding where methods came from, finding parent modules of modules, and finding their parents, configuration, and I started to note a general lack of IDE autocomplete and type-safety.

Then after a few years I jumped ship to Elixir and if felt like a breath of clean air when I had to learn FP. Everything was simple enough to understand. Performance knocks Elixir, Node, Python and any other interpreted stack out of the water. The Phoenix framework was, and is said to be thoughtfully designed and although there was no IDE support, we still had Elixir LS which was great enough to provide realtime guidance, linting and type safety during compile time. I was able to ship a very large app into production and it was bulletproof. The problem with Elixir was our other engineers struggled to shift away from Node, or any other stacks they already knew. They found the entire FP world to be weird. Hell, I found it weird too at times. Simple mutations of maps and arrays, that would be trivial in Ruby ended up being so complex in Elixir. In the end it felt like my team was not on the same page. I guess Elixir would be great if you ran a 3-person team or something, but since we were not, we got back to Ruby. In today's world though, I am largely looking at Go, for a backend system. IDE support is up there with Java, and the ecosystem is old and mature enough to find any package that you look for. Performance is C-like and learning curve is lean.

Just my 2c with all these platforms.

LanceH|8 months ago

I was working with Go a lot as something complementary to Ruby/Rails. I have ended up with so much Ruby work. Either maintenance of large successful efforts from years ago, new development for those same companies, or new development from the people who have experienced great success with Ruby on Rails. I can't seem to get away from it, and that's just fine.

At this point, I putting together teams and getting new developers into Ruby on Rails. I'm also seeing companies move back to full stack RoR after the luster of React has worn off. Also, modern RoR can get you so far now with a fraction of the dual framework headaches of a RoR backend/JS frontend.

sergiotapia|8 months ago

Rails has more baked in for the typical crud app. Example:

Try to create a way for people to upload documents like images and PDFs and documents. Okay easy enough on both platforms and I want you to generate a preview for each of those files so that people can easily find those files. Now I want you to add pagination. Now I want you to add column sorting so that people can sort by file size or by name or by upload date. Finally I want you to add a search field. Going by the way all of this stuff needs to live in the URL so that you can bookmark all the different you know choices you've made.

The stuff is pretty trivial and rails but in elixir you would have to bake it all yourself very boring code that doesn't really matter. This is why I chose to build my startups admin dashboard in rails despite our main production API being an elixir.

ricketycricket|8 months ago

LiveView uploads are baked in, previews and all. Everything else you list is included in the Flop library, if you want something off the shelf. In rails you are still including Kaminari or whatever other gems for all this too, so this is really no different.

sanswork|8 months ago

Check out ash-hq.org they are basically building the data side framework to handle all those things and it works great with Phoenix.

bhaak|8 months ago

Rails might be 90% better for webdev than the rest while Elixir might be 95% better. Talk about diminishing returns.

Add in problems finding developers skilled in Elixir and Phoenix and the small available libraries.

Of course, you also have that to some degree in Rails but it is much less pronounced.

kybishop|8 months ago

> Add in problems finding developers skilled in Elixir and Phoenix and the small available libraries.

Is this actually a problem you see? I'm going on 15 years in the industry and haven't seen any issues training people up on a new language in just a couple months.

If you need an expert in some library or language to make meaningful business progress I feel like that says more about whatever tool or language you're using, and I simply don't see that with phoenix or elixir in the years I've worked with it.

pdimitar|8 months ago

> Add in problems finding developers skilled in Elixir and Phoenix and the small available libraries.

Since the last 12-15 months, every Elixir job posted gets literal hundreds of applications. Just saying.

Shank|8 months ago

> I have a hard time seeing why one would choose rails

I like Ruby, and I feel it has significantly prettier syntax, to me, than Elixir. So that’s a big reason why I also like rails.

throwawaymaths|8 months ago

It's a matter of taste, but i found Ruby syntax to be annoyingly inconsistent, and do |..| ... end being something that isn't quite a lambda a huge source of confusion.

also activerecord doing "trust me bro" things behind the scenes (like pluralization) drove me up the wall.

to be fair ecto does a small bit of this too, but at least it doesn't change spellings (so you can global search an identifier).

AstroBen|8 months ago

If you're looking for something to invest in for the long term I think Rails wins by a mile. They have the funding, investment and strong companies dependent on it to keep it marching forward - both the framework and surrounding libraries

bee_rider|8 months ago

Fortran nowadays is fairly ergonomic and modern.

In terms of successors there’s maybe Julia, or otherwise you’d have to use Python or Matlab/Octave, with all that going to a scripting language entails. In any case it doesn’t really feel like there’s been a replacement.

poisonta|8 months ago

Elixir is a great language, but it lacks a framework as polished and full-featured as Rails. Phoenix could have been far more popular if it had something like Active Record.

poisonta|8 months ago

Many Rails developers try Phoenix at some point because they may need better performance. They’re so accustomed to the Rails structure that they assume Rails has done everything right. However, Ecto and ActiveRecord are two very different beasts. When Rails developers try out Ecto, they often feel there’s too much boilerplate and believe the Rails design is much more intuitive. This, I think, is one reason Phoenix struggles to attract Rails developers. If it can’t please Rails users, it will rarely appeal to others.

guywithahat|8 months ago

As someone who has used elixir for startups and loves it, the benefit of Rails for a startup is that it's easier to pick up. html/live projects can create more confusing layouts, which can make it harder to learn if you're trying to get something running. Rails is a great framework to use if you're primary product is not a website, but you need a website.

burnt-resistor|8 months ago

It'd be nice if IEx command history search and recall worked, but it doesn't. ):