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by mgdev 1040 days ago
After 20 years trying All The Frameworks, Phoenix is the first that excites me in a long time. Both the community and the coding experience remind me of Rails's early days in 2004/2005.

Same for Elixir in general. Different philosophies, but same energy, some craftsmanship, some welcoming attitudes, same hubris about what can/can't be done by revisiting from first principles.

LiveView is quite elegant, and is something that could only exist with such elegance in a language/runtime/community that values and supports long-lived processes with functional semantics.

Broadway builds on the shoulders of giants to provide robust data ingestion and processing... as a library, rather than the cobbled-together set of independent systems that is usually needed to do this.

The architectural concepts underlying Livebook put it on a path to surpass Jupyter, if only we can get critical mass adoption.

The stuff emerging in the Elixir + ML space thanks to Nx and Axon gives me some hope that Elixir will find a place as an all-in-one home for all things ML. Livebook makes it easy do to incremental experimentation. Bumblebee makes it stupidly simple to use pretrained models.

It's all so magical.

What we need, though, is better marketing!

1 comments

> The architectural concepts underlying Livebook put it on a path to surpass Jupyter, if only we can get critical mass adoption. > > The stuff emerging in the Elixir + ML space thanks to Nx and Axon gives me some hope that Elixir will find a place as an all-in-one home for all things ML. Livebook makes it easy do to incremental experimentation. Bumblebee makes it stupidly simple to use pretrained models.

Totally. My current employer does a bunch of data science and ML stuff and I'm hoping those give us a path off Python. Right now, it's hard for me as a non-data science, non-ML person to just be like, "here, use this Elixir thing instead of $tool_theyve_been_using_daily_for_10_years, I swear it's probably better or at least will be eventually"

Totally. I support a team of 40+ and even I have a hard time proposing this. Very hard to go against the herd.

There's so much progress happening in existing Python-powered ML community that, unless there are very good interop tools and protocols (e.g. ONNX and the like), then even if you gain productivity gains w/your local team by moving to Elixir, you risk losing your ability to draft off that larger community's progress.

Very hard trade-off unless you're sufficiently funded to invest in the gaps.