[_asummers]

We use Elixir at work, and Erlang tools have a bit of a discovery problem. You can peek at download counts on Hex, if the author uses it, but that doesn't take account CI systems and such that inflate DL counts, or GitHub only repos that are not on Hex (see things like e.g. shell history prior to OTP20).

That said, when there is no Elixir tool to do what I want, the very next thing I do is look for an Erlang tool, and there is often one that gets me most of the way to where I need to go. Wrapper libs are nice sugar, but they're almost always unnecessary when you can just call Erlang directly (String v charlist conversions notwithstanding!).

[fbernier]

Download count is a weak metric for evaluating the quality of a library. I don't think it's a good idea to skip the few minutes it takes to read parts of the documentation and critical parts of the code.

[_asummers]

I agree completely. I never said that it should be used for evaluation or that you shouldn't read the code or docs.

But then the question is... how do you find high quality libraries without something like download count? The issue is signaling good libraries, with poor discovery. I subscribe to many "libraries worth looking at" mailing lists, the awesome lists, etc. but that is still a pretty coarse net. Searching for libraries on GitHub if you don't know the name already or don't really know what you're specifically looking for is an even worse experience.

Combine that with relatively poor fuzzy search on Hex, where even if you DO know what you're looking for, it leads to a very subpar experience. For example, "e-commerce" leads to different results than "commerce". [0][1] These then exclude [2], which is an ecommerce library available on Hex without that keyword.

[0] https://hex.pm/packages?_utf8=%E2%9C%93&search=ecommerce&sor...

[1] https://hex.pm/packages?search=commerce&sort=downloads

[2] https://hex.pm/packages/ryal_core

[ericmj]

Search on hex.pm is not great and can definitely be improved, but we are currently at the limit of postgres full text search afaik, unless there are some magic things to tweak. This means we need to switch to other technologies to improve the search which is a bigger task.

But regardless of how good search is it wouldn't find ryal_core when searching for "commerce" if that word or any similar is nowhere in the metadata. The description for the package ryal_core is "The core of Ryal." which doesn't do the search any favours.

[_asummers]

Absolutely, and I'm thankful for all the hard work you all put in. I sound more annoyed than I am, and I know it was worse years ago before hex came around. Why can't Hex mind read yet?! :P

I think indexing GH READMEs would go a long way to helping the discovery problem, perhaps utilizing the new GH tags thing in some capacity, even letting authors tag their own packages. That would help in this specific case though this is of course a pathological example I happened to find recently. Maybe also having a "people who have X as a dependency also tend to download Y", though I'm not sure if you have that information outside of direct dependency graphs on Hex packages.

I feel like many newer languages have this problem, but the weird thing about Elixir is the 20-30 years of Erlang libs that are out there that are great that people have issues finding. It's worse if the libs aren't on Hex, and anecdotally I think people have been moving to Hex more lately for Erlang libs.