[mike1o1]

I've been using Elixir for about a year on a side project and I've been enjoying it more than any other backend I've used (Node, Rails and C#). I recently discovered Ash and I feel like after that initial learning curve my productivity (and code quality) has improved quite a bit.

I wish Elixir had more mindshare beside just LiveView and "real time" type functionality. Even building a GraphQL/JSON endpoint without real-time requirements, the functional nature (no side effects), pattern matching and ruby inspired syntax makes writing plain old JSON controllers a joy.

While Elixir might not have a package for every use case under the sun, the low level primitives are there.

[realusername]

Personally while I enjoy Elixir/Phoenix, I didn't like Ash because there's way too many keyword DSL to learn.

It's like Rails except that there's much more resources for Rails to find if you made a mistake in the DSL

[mike1o1]

Yes, the learning curve is a extremely high. It took a few false starts over time, but after the "Ash book" came out, I gave it a more serious try and it finally started to click for me.

I think it helped that at the time I was trying to build some pretty advanced filtering functionality using Ecto and was having a pretty tough time. While searching for solutions I saw a few mentions of Ash and that it could solve the problem out of the box.

After a few days of experiments, I found that it was able to do the filtering I wanted out of the box and was even more functional than what I was trying to build.

For reference, I was trying to add some tagging functionality to a resource and I wanted to be able to filter by that tag, including multiple tags. Can I do that in Ecto? Of course, but Ash provided that out of the box after modeling the resource.

[pmarreck]

Except that it's not like Rails in the sense that in Rails, you will eventually develop extremely difficult to debug race conditions thanks to mutability that Elixir lacks.

Source: Has worked on million-line Ruby on Rails codebase