[jimbokun]

I'm curious if Elixir could provide a similar development environment?

Seems like many similar capabilities, like a focus on immutable data structures, pure functions, being able to patch and update running systems without a restart, etc.

[kevinmershon]

For the most part, yes.

CIDER and nREPL is better tech than IEX though. I live in both and Clojure is much more enjoyable.

[innocentoldguy]

I came to the opposite conclusion for the following reasons:

1. IEx provides a robust and interactive debugging environment that allows me to dig into whatever I want, even when running in production. I've never lost state in IEx, but that happens fairly often in CIDER and nREPL.

2. IEx uses Elixir's compilation model, which is a lot faster than CIDER and nREPL, leading to faster debugging cycles.

3. IEx is tightly integrated with Elixir whereas Clojure's tools are more fragmented.

4. IEx doesn't carry the overhead of additional middleware that CIDER and nREPL do.

I'm also not a fan of JVM deployments, so I've migrated all my code away from Clojure to Elixir during the past 10 years.