I think what the blog post is getting is OTP and the mystical/but not mystical GenServer / Supervisor/ distributed pattern. It's baked right in there as a core part of the Erlang VM. I think the post glances over the fact that in rails land solid queue may be right there to use (I've not really used rails in over 10 years).
Thing is with Elixir though, yes the tools are right there, but you do have to take time to understand them. I've been on and off with Elixir since 2016 and I'm currently wrapping up on a fairly complex elixir project with zero UI. (connecting Shopify GraphQL to a series of 3rd party fulfilment providers who use SFTP (gross). So yes, GenServer, Supervisor etc are all right there as first class citizens, but whilst they are relatively simple to start using, you can end up with some horrifically structured code that would have been much better written without the distributed stuff.
Personally, I prefer Django. Been using it since 2006 and as a person who started off in design but ended up as an engineer, nothing beats Django's template engine (braces for incoming). Django isn't perfect but nothing is. When I have to get something done quick and there's UI work for me to do, I go to Django. When performance or no UI, I go elixir. If someone else is doing the UI, I go phoenix.
IMHO Django's templating engine is its worst feature but that only proves how subjective all these matters can be. I'm currently making money both from Django and Rails. I made quite a bit of money from Phoenix years ago. Customers choose their platforms, I can choose customers.
About OTP's primitives, they are great but a background job system has more features than those primitives offer. We wrote a fair amount of extra code to get what we needed for our production system. I'm using Sidekiq in Rails in my current Rails project and it's more feature complete than what we built for Phoenix. I'm using Celery with RabbitMQ in my current Django project and we would like to get rid of it. It's too fragile.
jamiecurle|4 months ago
Thing is with Elixir though, yes the tools are right there, but you do have to take time to understand them. I've been on and off with Elixir since 2016 and I'm currently wrapping up on a fairly complex elixir project with zero UI. (connecting Shopify GraphQL to a series of 3rd party fulfilment providers who use SFTP (gross). So yes, GenServer, Supervisor etc are all right there as first class citizens, but whilst they are relatively simple to start using, you can end up with some horrifically structured code that would have been much better written without the distributed stuff.
Personally, I prefer Django. Been using it since 2006 and as a person who started off in design but ended up as an engineer, nothing beats Django's template engine (braces for incoming). Django isn't perfect but nothing is. When I have to get something done quick and there's UI work for me to do, I go to Django. When performance or no UI, I go elixir. If someone else is doing the UI, I go phoenix.
conradfr|4 months ago
But I'm happy running worker type things in elixir & Phoenix if I can.
pmontra|4 months ago
About OTP's primitives, they are great but a background job system has more features than those primitives offer. We wrote a fair amount of extra code to get what we needed for our production system. I'm using Sidekiq in Rails in my current Rails project and it's more feature complete than what we built for Phoenix. I'm using Celery with RabbitMQ in my current Django project and we would like to get rid of it. It's too fragile.