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by invalidOrTaken 1354 days ago
My company (as in "I work there," not "I own it") is I think unique in that it started as an Elixir/TypeScript shop, things went seriously downhill, they brought in a new engineering team (I'm on it), we switched to Clojure, and we're doing fine.

If I were to start a new company I'd absolutely run it on clojure. Even without frontend/backend code reuse, REPL-driven dev---paredit is the killer app for me. It just makes editing text files, which is what we're doing if we admit it, so much easier.

It's a data point.
1 comments
powersurge360 1354 days ago
This might actually be the first thing I've seen pop up organically about Elixir that isn't red hot glowing praise. Can you elaborate on what was going wrong and if it was anything specific to Elixir/Typescript?
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invalidOrTaken 1351 days ago
From what I can gather the old CTO did some things that were...less than ethical.

As far as the code goes, they wrote a custom DB that is O(nm) when counting tables---that is, it must count every record in the DB to count how many tables there are.

(Incidentally, I had forgotten this the other day and tried to do a "quick" table count...oops!)

I don't know Elixir or TS well enough to say if we have Ex/ts problems---from what I can tell:

- Elixir seems alright, I'd love to learn what the BEAM magic I keep hearing about is

- however, syntactically I find it pretty garbage, or at least uninspired. (Note that I am a spoiled Clojure guy and have this reaction to Python, Ruby, etc. I acknowledge people can get productive work done in them.)

- TS I have ha-ha-kinda-seriously trauma about from a previous job. I'm not a good person to ask here b/c I'm pretty firmly pro-dynamic in the Type wars. I will say that it is pretty freaking great to be able to have an emacs buffer open w/a repl to the cljs frontend we have for other apps, and that I really miss it whenever I have to go through the ts code.

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