[toberoni]

I've been playing around with Elixir and rewrote a small Rails app in Phoenix to get used to it. In the end, the benefits are not big enough to make the switch

Pros:

- Less magic. It's a lot easier to figure out what's going on under the hood. - Phoenix is an improved Rails. Ecto is more flexible, the generators make more sense and everything is better organized. - FP leads to cleaner code. The difference to a neatly organized Rails (with POROs & service objects) is not big though. - Tooling/Mix is excellent. - Elixirforum is a great place full of helpful people.

Cons:

- Small ecosystem and lower productivity. I often had to spend 1-2 days to write a feature where with Rails I'd download a gem and it's done. - Elixir gets hyped up due to BEAM, OTP, stability, fault tolerance... - however, apart from some very niche cases most of its features can be replicated with background queues, Kubernetes, etc. - Speed & hosting costs. Elixir is a bit faster than Ruby and the footprint is smaller. But a powerful VPS + CDN is so cheap nowadays that it doesn't matter much at my scale. - It's an absolute niche language. There aren't many tutorials, SO answers or solutions for small problems - you often have to figure it out on your own.

Overall I'd say that Elixir is fun to work with and ist well thought-through. At the end of the day I only care about shipping products though. Writing my admin backend in clean FP code is nice, but I rather download a gem like Administrate and be done with it - so I have more time to focus on my core features.

From a business perspective I don't see many cases for Elixir: A small shop is more productive with Rails/JS/Python due to the vast ecosystems - and a bigger company will have trouble finding enough devs.