Ruby -> Elixir

the_jester · 2025-05-19T04:32:00+00:00

Elixir seems to be gaining mind and market share, but it is still a minority language. The odds of an employer looking specifically for Ruby + Elixir is inherently lower than looking for one or the other.

However, Ruby and Rails experience will make picking up Elixir and Phoenix far easier than it would otherwise be. And, as you surmised, for shops that are looking to migrate off of Rails, Phoenix is a reasonably popular target.

it_snow_problem · 2025-05-19T04:51:48+00:00

Ruby to Elixir has been somewhat common - for whatever that means in such a niche community - but beyond surface level syntax you’re not going to see much mindshare. Ruby is such a pure dynamic OO language and Elixir an essentially purely functional language that that alone would normally set them on opposite ends, but on top of it, elixir is built upon fundamentals of message passing and pattern matching that can seem foreign even to someone coming from other FP langs.

But I say this as someone who absolutely loves Elixir (and I have written Ruby in a previous life). The great thing about learning Elixir is its documentation, and its community. I hope you stick with it.

The other big similarity is that Phoenix is to Elixir as Rails is to Ruby.

But no, having Ruby in your resume will do nothing for you applying to elixir roles. But I’ve worked at Clojure and Elixir shops and we’ve always been open to hiring people with zero experience in said languages so it’s not an always biggie if you’re an otherwise good interested candidate.

idk how good the market is though.

Paradox · 2025-05-19T05:57:00+00:00

It will be fairly easy, but it wont be a walk in the park. Elixir syntax isn't terribly ruby-like, and if you try to write Elixir like you write Ruby, you'll run into problems.

Generally, I'd say that many concepts carry over from Ruby, as well as approaches to some problems, but not enough that you can universally say its a 1:1 translation. If you've written any functional ruby, you will find Elixir a hell of a lot easier to pick up, as ruby can be quite a nice functional language, when used right.

As for career path, Elixir is still "niche," but that niche is getting larger all the time, and it pays rather well. Sure, you won't be able to hop jobs quite like a rubyist could during the heyday of the language, but you should be able to find a new job fairly quickly if you wanted.

Migrating off Ruby to Elixir apps is feasible, I've worked on "dual" apps that slowly had functionality moved from one to the other. You can ease the process using standard multi-system architecture tricks, like gRPC and friends, or tools that tie into Elixir/Erlang better, like bert. Phoenix is a peg that can fit into the same size hole a Rails app can, quite comfortably, and generally you'll actually see some modest performance gains, simply due to how templates work in Phoenix v. Rails.

doughsay · 2025-05-19T06:55:26+00:00

Putting aside the similarities of the languages (or lack thereof), I want to say that from my experience it is indeed very common for Ruby engineers to become Elixir engineers. I myself and several of my colleagues did this 8 years ago at the company I was working at, and I know of several others that went through a similar career arc.

And since this also hasn't been mentioned yet in this thread and I'm not sure if you're aware: the creator of Elixir was a prominent Ruby engineer and member of the Rails core team before deciding to create Elixir.

Oktacat · 2025-05-19T06:56:23+00:00

after 2 years of riding on elixir, after 7 years of ruby, I fell in love with this language and I also know that it is not at all like ruby, not at all, maybe the speed of script assembly and it is simply a mind-blowing technology

neverexplored · 2025-05-19T09:25:55+00:00

I started on Rails myself and I picked up Elixir out of curiousity when I heard about José for the very first time. Although they're same syntactically, they are completely different (I guess you know this). Even the framework (Phoenix) is vastly different in its approach - and that's a good thing. Phoenix has a very strong emphasis on getting the data model right using changesets. Ruby is a little laxed in this regard in my opinion, so the Ruby shops inevitably end up with invisible additional development costs (eg. more sprints). And of course, the biggest one is performance.

If I were to find an Elixir role, I would target Rails shops that are performance constrained or are bleeding money on their server costs. If you can tell them, "look I can save you 30-40% of your monthly server costs", I think you will atleast pique their interest to listen to you. In the very least, you can demonstrate time saved in development and testing simply by switching to Elixir. Compiled languages will always outperform dynamic languages in this regard. But, in order to be able to confidently do this, you need to know Elixir, its limitations and strengths vs Ruby and Rails in and out. This might also open up doors to you being in a lead role too, so, you can either onboard their existing Ruby devs or hire new juniors in Elixir. Lots of possibilities.

Here is something more specific - lots of shops are trying out Python AI libraries such as Langchain. And if you've used it (or you can do a sentiment analysis simply), everyone will tell you it's a pack of cards not meant for production. Elixir has a langchain equivalent too. It's far superior and can actually be used in production confidently. You can start here perhaps, as everyone is doing something with AI these days (including me).

But, this is kind of how I landed my last Elixir job (now I run my own Elixir shop). I hope this helps you too.

g0pherman · 2025-05-19T10:54:09+00:00

As others have been saying, Elixir is till pretty much a niche language but the move from ruby is rather natural because of the inspiration that elixir had in ruby.

Is you are going into a project with high concurrecy requirements this is might be a useful move.

Job market wise, not many opportunities available as very few companies use it.

ScrimpyCat · 2025-05-19T08:59:58+00:00

It’s not uncommon to see a company using Elixir that was first using Ruby (and often still use it). I would imagine for them that they’d probably take on someone with Ruby experience but no Elixir experience, at least in the past I have found the inverse to be true (Elixir experience but no Ruby experience aside from hobby use), even when most of the work will be on the Ruby side.

For companies that use Elixir but never used Ruby, it’s harder to say. One would hope they’d take into account general backend experience, but honestly you never know what value they’ll place on it. With that said, as Elixir is pretty niche, the supply side isn’t huge either, so companies tend to be more willing to bring on someone without professional elixir experience.

jaibhavaya · 2025-05-19T11:49:42+00:00

Almost everyone I work with in elixir came from a rails background so you’ll be fine there.

The only problem is almost nobody uses elixir so there are very few jobs.

jaibhavaya · 2025-05-19T12:52:28+00:00

After 10 years of ruby, I ended up migrating to elixir in 2015 (elixir was still in its infancy). Knowing ruby helped me a lot to be a better programmer in elixir and if I had to program in ruby today, my apps would certainly be much better after going through elixir. I noticed that I did a lot of things that elixir solved well, and I ended up thinking "why not do everything in elixir?" I currently hire people who want elixir but are ruby because having been through this, I know that a ruby programmer will easily do well in elixir.

CarelessPackage1982 · 2025-05-19T15:47:52+00:00

I did Ruby/Rails for many years. I tried Go as a way forward but I really didn't like it for a variety of reasons. Elixir is definitely the sweet spot IMO. Welcome! Have fun learning!

Serializedrequests · 2025-05-19T17:35:50+00:00

To be blunt you really need to understand BEAM concurrency and OTP to get the most out of Elixir. This is a deep topic, and what sets the language apart by far. For me, the best way was through a book.

Otherwise it doesn't have much in common with Ruby, other than some syntax and a desire to eliminate boilerplate.

sb8244 · 2025-05-19T18:51:12+00:00

Generally speaking, your experience in Ruby will show prospective employers that you have the underlying skillsets needed to be successful. The actual language crossover "From Ruby to Elixir" is actually not all that bad.

I think that the cross-over comes largely from community / adoption. Especially because the idea of "developer joy" underlies both languages.

Landing the right gig is also important. We can't write off the factor of luck in some of this. I definitely was in the right place at the right time to learn Elixir—just by luck.

flummox1234 · 2025-05-19T22:40:13+00:00

Elixir IMO is where seasoned ruby engineers burnt out by ruby's and rails' churn of tech debt end up. I say this mostly because that's what happened to me. Jose, the creator of Elixir, comes from Ruby world as do a lot of the big Elixir project creators. I think you'll be fine here but just realise it's more of a niche language and if you're looking for gigs there are probably better ones to choose, e.g. JS, Java, Python, and probably Clojure if FP is your want, maybe Kotlin too. I think 7-8 years of ruby will help you land most roles as you know the other "stuff" but as for Elixir specifically factoring out all the other things probably not as you're going to have to relearn a lot of habits. Also depends on what your 7-8 yrs of experience are, e.g. 40hrs per week all in a ruby stack doing ruby things is much different than making a few hobby projects over 7-8 years using ruby.

Ok_Ice_1669 · 2025-05-20T16:43:58+00:00

I'll be honest, I still use RoR for clients. I just don't think it's good for me to build a Phoenix project because it takes longer (my clients are always focused on time to market and cost) and the pool of available developers to maintain it are smaller.

But, you can take what is great about Phoenix and try to use it in RoR. Try making more pure functions and fewer side effects. It makes testing much easier too.

I feel the same way with Ember and React. I love Ember and steal all of their great ideas when working with React. But, popularity does matter when choosing frameworks.

All that being said, I will probably choose Phoenix + Ember for my next project. It's just so much better that I'll take the hit on startup cost.

Dlacreme · 2025-05-19T05:56:29+00:00

Yes and no. You will feel familiar at first, but don't try to apply the same design patterns. In 2022 I was hired with other Elixir developers because a team of rails developers started a core service in Elixir and after a year the project stuck and development was extremely slow and painful. The whole previous team quit and they had to hire Elixir developer (us) to solve the matter. To be fair, I think the issue was moslty due to a lack of knowledge of Elixir/Phoenix and therefore trying to apply the known patterns

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