[andy_ppp]

I would say it's about developer happiness while coding and that all the decisions made by Jose and the core team tend to have been the correct decision. So taking Phoenix as an example you look at the framework and every time they find a problem i.e. Presence instead of saying that's a difficult problem and moving on they fix said problem in a really scalable way [1].

The same could be said for things like data processing with Flow [2] or even things like Ecto (semi official database wrapper) or even third party libraries like say ex_money [3].

Then you start looking at the packages and language and see that there are rarely thousands of bugs or that the infrastructure (mix, hex, docs etc.) is really nice to use and that the language is really stable, yet still provides you with useful but clear abstractions. Or that you can spin off processes and tasks inline without too much worry, or that you can use 20+ years of Erlang libs transparently, or that it's immutable and has the best concurrency primitives of any system available, or that it allow you to supervise processes and let them crash if needed without bringing down your app, or that you can transparently get multi machine out of the box, or that message passing is build in as the default way to scale the system. Or pattern matching or |> or the amazing community.

[1] https://phoenixframework.org/blog/the-road-to-2-million-webs... and https://dockyard.com/blog/2016/03/25/what-makes-phoenix-pres...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPlXNUXmcgE

[3] https://github.com/kipcole9/money

[pmontra]

Actually Ecto is the most unhappy part of the Elixir ecosystem to me. It's unnecessarily complicated for almost any software project. I'd even take Django's ORM instead of it, but what I want is something close to ActiveRecord. There are some Elixir modules similar to AR, none popular.

[josevalim]

It is tragically funny how many people like and how many people dislike Ecto. :) I guess that's "ORM"s in a nutshell? Which is totally fine, of course!

[1_player]

Ecto is not an ORM, and an ORM like ActiveRecord would never fit a functional, immutable language anyway. Ecto is a query builder and DSL.

But I may be biased, I _love_ Ecto and have been using it every day for the past year, and have never come across something as powerful yet lightweight (perhaps SQLAlchemy, ignoring its ORM features).