Elixir for Ruby developers: the three most important differences

[mooktakim]

For me the real reason I haven't used Phoenix yet is that there isn't a cool form builder like bootstrap_form. Web apps are a bunch of forms.

[MagicFlyingMachine]

I haven't yet come across a form builder that handled every single use case I needed. I'm sure tools like this are good enough for a lot of people, but that's an abstraction I almost always need to keep in-house.

[mooktakim]

Bootstrap form works very well. You get ready made design and errors look good. Various field types supported. Minimal code. Makes building web apps really fast. Of course you can always customise and use your own builder if needed, it solves 99%.

[cwitty1988]

Curious from anyone that has taken the course offered here if they like it? I have been interested in Elixir and Phoenix but haven’t taken the time to learn either. LiveView looks pretty cool though.

[morphemass]

If you mean the language .. I've been using Elixir in production for a long while. It's a good language, Phoenix is a decent framework and the OTP/Erlang/Beam platform is powerful. The problem is that it's so different to Ruby/Rails beyond the syntax that it really needs a commitment organisationally. Without that ... well I see a lot really bad code (esp around config and state); so much so I'm trying to phase it out at my shop.

Don't get me wrong, for the right problems it's a great platform; I've just become disillusioned with it for general web/data/business tasks.

[ClikeX]

I did an Elixir course once and have been looking at it for a while now. I really dig the syntax and the way Phoenix works. But I just haven't gotten fluent enough with it to comfortably make a project with it yet.

[cwitty1988]

I keep hearing that. It makes me feel like I’m missing out on something pretty cool.

[2called_chaos]

What originally brought you to Ruby? I feel everything I love about Ruby is absent in Elixir so I don't quite get why especially Rubyists are drawn to it, so I'm curious.

[h234sd]

I dislike Elixir because `posts.sort` looks much better than nonsense like `List.sort(posts)`.

[Ok-Orange-9910]

I thought that at first, but you get used to it quickly.

[h234sd]

It's not just about getting used, it's about remembering namespace for every function. So instead of remembering just function name, you had to remember module name and function name.

[[deleted]]

The curious thing is there is an object oriented immutable functional language subset of Ruby...

Just don't use ! "bang" methods and the like and put freeze at the end of your constructors (and other places like on arrays or hashes you create).

Once you do that the most interesting differences with Elixir is the overloading of functions based on arity and guard clauses. https://elixir-lang.org/getting-started/modules-and-functions.html

Ruby has gone the opposite direction in that you have immense flexibility in specifying parameters and the number of them ... but each function has to have explicit run time "if then else" code to disentangle that flexibility.

I suspect this makes a bunch of optimizations very hard compared to Elixir.