| > My point is that it doesn't come with Phoenix out of the box (unless something has changed?) You put a lot of weight on built-in features of frameworks in your reply. This is not an objective truth and even DHH himself admitted as much -- including in his article "Rails is Omakase" which I very much enjoyed (because he says that the Rails team picks what they deem the best ingredients and if you disagree then you are not the target audience). You find value in "officially vetted" libraries, I find value in being assemble to assemble my chair the way I want it to, with parts I built or bought myself. Neither practice is superior per se. Let's both admit that. > They won't even consider adding basic things for developer productivity like undoing a generator. Honest question: how many tech stacks even allow for that? Does Ruby have bytecode instrumentation on the level of, say, the JVM? (Java's instrumentation has unlocked it some quite impressive code generation and runtime code analysis abilities.) Generating boilerplate is pretty easy. But how many tools out there can scan your code and tell you "this looks like Devise's boilerplate with exceptions in files A and B on lines 123 to 150 and 201 to 217"? If Rails can do that I'd be very impressed. It couldn't, as far as I was aware, about 4 years ago. > There's a balance of making something easy to use and making something "technically superior". I never said this was important to me. I value Elixir's hassle-free parallelism and concurrency (which is more than what can be said about 99% of the tech out there where those things are always an afterthought). And Elixir is still pretty easy to use. I don't see why both things have to be presented as opponents? Seems like a false dichotomy. > The Rails team seems to care much more deeply about what the framework feels like to use You have spoken to the authors and they have told you this, in these exact words? > ...and the Phoenix team cares more about building something that is "dogmatically perfect" (which you're correlating with quality) And you have spoken with the Phoenix team. And they told you this. Exactly this? No. They don't do that. They don't want to steer developers in the direction they might deem the best (they said as much on ElixirForum). They give you freedom to choose. And the community has provided alternative approaches for a number of the classic building blocks of a web app. That's all there is to it and I am not sure how you managed to so grossly misrepesent it. :( I also never said anything about dogmatically perfect being important (much less correlated to quality!). You are projecting and we are talking past each other which doesn't help the discussion at all. If I cared about purity or similar concepts in the "dogmatically perfect" lane I'd go for Haskell or even Idris. Elixir -- and thus Phoenix -- are very far from "pure", "dogmatically perfect" or any such other academic ideals. Really not sure where you got that from? > What's easier for someone to learn? This is extremely subjective and varies from person to person. Are you claiming that Rails' way is factually superior to learn? To me both are quite straightforward and both require you to have learned some concepts beforehand. And both aren't exactly English with which you command the machine, no? > If Phoenix wants to increase their adoption, then I think they need to accept that things like this matter. Ever since I dropped off the mainstream tech train and started working on the sidelines I've noticed something extremely curious which is happening very consistently: the people who work with mainstream tech always assume that the smaller community wants more adoption. There have been a number of discussions on ElixirForum about this and various important figures of the maintainers' teams have openly said that they aren't aiming to make the language and its stack more popular; they want to make useful tech. One example is the recent Phoenix 1.5.0 release which now comes integrated with LiveView. A lot of people apparently don't want to deal with JS because at least 50% of the new posts on the forum since the announcement have asked exclusively about LiveView. So again, the maintainers aim to make useful tech, not to trend on Twitter, dev.to, StackOverflow, or anywhere else really. --- This became rather long. I apologise for that but still wanted to address several misconceptions that seem to have arisen in this discussion. |
We all wanna get paid in the end of the day. Lots of Rails devs got spooked that 5 years from now their knowledge will go to shit. A lot of them still feel insecure about the state of Ruby, even with 90B companies like Shopify using it, because they read a blog about how a startup no one heard of migrated from Rails to Elixir. You don't seem to care about any of that and that's great. But let's face it, a lot of the back and forth "what's better tech" wars and shitting on each other's stacks is simply trying (maybe subconsciously) to gain more adoption and to validate our choices in life, and feel good about what we do by feeling superior to others. Just like a religion really or any other form of community. These aren't really academic discussion on what's "better" in my view.