Why Elixir?

https://whyelixir.dev/

by lobo_tuerto • 2 years ago

7 3 2 years ago

whyelixir.dev

innocentoldguy• 2 years ago

The reasons I reach for Elixir and Phoenix over any other languages and frameworks for web development are:

1. Excellent tooling (e.g., Mix, IEx, Formatter, testing, debugging, Credo, ExDoc, Livebook, etc.)

2. Excellent concurrency and fault tolerance.

3. Ability to handle extremely large numbers of simultaneous connections in an efficient manner.

4. Lightweight processes that handle both vertical and horizontal scaling.

5. Phoenix channels.

6. Full-stack development support.

7. Supervision trees.

8. Macro support.

9. Interoperability with Erlang.

10. One of the most supportive communities I've experienced.

11. Excellent error messages and debug support.

12. Excellent testing framework.

13. Good support in my editor of choice (Helix).

14. Mike and Nicole at Pragmatic Studio (for teaching new hires who don't know Elixir).

ralmidani• 2 years ago

I work with Elixir full-time and agree with all of these. I just want to add:

- Elixir docs are top notch, both the existing docs for the language and its ecosystem, and the ease of generating your own docs for your projects and libraries.

- The only thing that is not currently top notch in Elixir is the Language Server and therefore IDE support. This will hopefully improve soon after the formation of an official Language Server team to unify previously disparate efforts (https://elixir-lang.org/blog/2024/08/15/welcome-elixir-langu...).

I mention the Language Server and IDE support because, IMO, it is the biggest __technical__ hurdle preventing widespread adoption. If you’re considering learning Elixir, I think now is a great time!

kimi• 2 years ago

Maybe it's not perfect, but it's definitely usable. I would not call it a stumbling block.

Why Elixir?

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