[zinclozenge]

I pretty much agree with this. As much as I liked the core language, I absolutely hated using anything else in the ecosystem, and in my opinion a lot of that was due to lack of static types. Using Ecto as the main way of interacting with the database was a miserable experience. Part of that was due to skill issue I'm sure.

[kerkeslager]

> As much as I liked the core language, I absolutely hated using anything else in the ecosystem, and in my opinion a lot of that was due to lack of static types.

You might be interested in Gleam[1].

[1] https://gleam.run/

[parthdesai]

> Using Ecto as the main way of interacting with the database was a miserable experience.

Ecto is prolly one of the best ways to interact with db. Genuinely curious, what other ORMs have you used?

[zinclozenge]

I usually just write the SQL, honestly. For the last 6ish years of my career I've mainly been in the Golang world, so the closest I've gotten to an ORM is a utility to scan rows into structs.

[freedomben]

Interesting, I usually just write the SQL too in most projects, but in Elixir I love Ecto because it's so close to the SQL but has an elegant and powerful way to handle interpolated values.

[Andys]

Have you tried sqlc? Different to any other SQL library I've used and suits Go really well

[zinclozenge]

Yes, I like it very much. I've run into some edge cases with it, and I wish there was a setting to change the names of some of the autogenerated code, but otherwise it works very well.

[Andys]

Yeah, hopefully its plugin architecture will continue to develop and make changing things easier in the future.

[sergiotapia]

On the flipside for me Ecto is the perfect balance between ORM and writing raw SQL queries. I've used many different ORMs like Entity Framework, ActiveRecord, Prisma, Ecto - Ecto stands alone.

[throwawaymaths]

I believe... technically Ecto is not an ORM but a query builder, which may be why you like it better than an ORM.

[malkosta]

> Ecto as the main way of interacting with the database was a miserable experience

That's very common when you don't know DBs. But DB savy developers usually claim the opposite, because the syntax is more familiar.

[zinclozenge]

> That's very common when you don't know DBs.

I'm not a 20 year DBA greybeard veteran, but I'm comfortable enough to write schemas and queries by hand without any issue, and the entire time I wished I could do just that instead of using Ecto.

[sph]

No one stops you from writing raw SQL with Ecto.

But good luck creating composable SQL with raw string interpolation, which Ecto excels at.

[zinclozenge]

PR reviewers stopped me from writing raw SQL.

[malkosta]

Ecto queries are much closer to DB queries, when you use the macro syntax.

But if you come from an ORM perspective and expect the same experience on Ecto, yes I agree it won't please you.