[engineerDave]

I don't know if this helps or hurts but I took up Elixir a few years ago and was liking it, the way the FP simplifies the scope you have to operate within and the general stability of the API that Jose has stated, i.e. it's feature complete for the foreseeable future, changes now are mostly optimizations such as pushing more into the erlang layer.

Then they introduced releases which can package everything into a tar file that has all the CSS, JS, HTML, erlang VM, etc. in it and runs as a binary via systemd and proxied through your .

Then they introduced LiveView and it was the first time I really had a "wow" moment since first learning Rails many many years ago. I can do nearly everything I want in real-time with it + JS hooks.

I really do think this addresses a lot of the frustration I keep experiencing w/r/t complexity in web development. I can just write Elixir code and get about 90% of the features of a JS framework like React.

The only real knock on it is it's strongly typed not static typed (they're working on a solution) but with code analysis tools like dialyzer and credo a lot of that worry is addressed. It's not for everyone but FWIW it has been a breath of fresh air to me a 10+ year web developer.

[boxed]

I've looked at Elixir a bit, but I came away with the expression that it would be a bit like doing Django before 1.7 where I had to do schema migrations manually. This is a huge deal to me.

I didn't see any forms libraries either, so the forms situation seems even more primitive. I'm the author of iommi so I now have very high level abstractions for forms/tables/menus/etc, and a transparent way to compose these. I would hate to start over from scratch...

Am I just missing some libraries?

[a_bored_husky]

Fwiw I was afraid of manual migrations too, coming from Django, but its not that terrible once you get used to it. There should be a few form libs out there but I havent needed one so far. Chris McCord said at ElixirConf that there are plans of reworking the forms api to make it work better with LiveView.

[boxed]

I'm not afraid of it. It just seems silly and tedious.

[sergiomattei]

I also felt that way coming from Django, but I got used to it and embraced it

It’s a lot like Rails in that regard, where you have to model the data yourself. But it’s a part of the job — and it teaches you take advantage of the DB in ways that Django can’t.

[0xblinq]

Elixir is a great idea, but it's already dead. I know of several companies here in Europe that already ditched it and went back to other older technologies or moved to Go, etc. because the Elixir ecosystem is so small. Also they had tons of trouble hiring for it.