[barrell]

I have the opposite experience. Even in production builds, I get Elixir stacktraces, and they're exceptionally helpful. Macros only save me time and LoC, I think maybe once I've struggled with a macro-caused issue (and it was immediately apparent that macros were the issue).

ExUnit has been hands down the most impressive testing library I've ever worked with, and the debugging, profiling, analytics, introspection, observability, etc of the BEAM is unbeatable.

Documentation of elixir, elixir deps, and elixir code is also far and above any language I've ever seen.

And the struggles I had supporting minimal concurrency in python were completely alleviated - so even if you don't need massive concurrency, elixir has a good chance of massively simplifying anything that needs minimal concurrency (which is probably most web related projects).

[29athrowaway]

When you say "above any language I've ever seen", can you be more explicit? Do you have an example?

I have a lot of respect for the community behind it but the experience is still not there.

[dns_snek]

I think it would be easier for all of us to understand if you elaborated on what you think the issues are. What concrete things are you missing from ExUnit and documentation, what do you wish was different?

[29athrowaway]

You can ask ChatGPT or any major model: from the perspective of an expert technical writer/information architect, how would it evaluate the Elixir documentation, and it will surface key issues.

[dns_snek]

I don't care what a sycophantic machine "thinks" because I can get any answer I want out of it by subtly changing the phrasing of the question. I thought you had legitimate points to discuss in good faith, not this nonsense.

[29athrowaway]

Take the documentation of GenStage, for example. It is a dry transition between what a stage is into advanced concepts with diagrams are in ASCII. https://hexdocs.pm/gen_stage/GenStage.html

Not only this article dumps significant cognitive load on the reader. It's not well digested and not a soft landing into the subject. Worst of all, many Elixir articles assume familiarity with GenStage.

Compare it to this, which is not the best example but is a much more soft landing. https://doc.akka.io/libraries/akka-core/current/typed/actors...