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by brightball 1204 days ago
I've been a PHP dev for 20 years and an Elixir dev for 6. This comment doesn't hold water.
1 comments

What's your honest assessment? Do you wish you had pressed on in PHP-land? ;)
Nah. PHP has it’s uses but Elixir got me excited about code again when I was thinking hard about a career change. I never thought I would find a language that naturally avoided almost every short term and long term issue in a code base I’ve come across in my career.

Finding something that balanced development speed, maintainability, testing speed, concurrency and simplicity while still advocating for things that should be obvious like leveraging your database to maintain data integrity…there’s just nothing else like it.

The trade offs necessary to do what this language does can’t be done without the language being built for it from the ground up, including the runtime. Doesn’t matter if we are talking PHP, Python, Ruby, Node, Go or Java. If it’s a C based language, the same problems will exist.

my feelings exactly

elixir has spoiled me. i'm currently looking for work and I am having a hard time accepting work in pretty much any other language, because...

> I never thought I would find a language that naturally avoided almost every short term and long term issue in a code base I’ve come across in my career.

... because OF THIS EXACT THING. And I can't even communicate it to people adequately! Frankly, it took me having to deal with the problems in a million-line Ruby codebase before realizing that Elixir made pretty much every one of them impossible (or at least, much harder to do) from the very roots of its design

Yep, I experienced the same thing. It’s so good it makes the problems of everything else very, very visible.