An Interview with Jose Valim, Creator of Elixir
Can someone post&#x2F;comment a more critical analysis of elixir if they can?<p>It&#x27;s really hard to figure out how useful it is because people always build up hype when it&#x27;s not always worth it. All I ever see is how wonderful and magical elixir is and how it&#x27;s literally life changing. I want to believe but I&#x27;ve seen technologies with lots of hype that didn&#x27;t live up to it. Plus elixir is different enough that I have a really hard time jumping into it to try it out.<p>----<p>I&#x27;ll also add that recently I had to build a backend for a long term project I&#x27;ve been working on. I seriously looked at elixir&#x2F;phoenix, but from my research it didn&#x27;t seem like the pros outweighed the cons. Like there are some technologies that are so useful they&#x27;re worth the lack of a robust ecosystem or the steep learning curve that may be necessary. And I am not sure Elixir meets that criteria.<p>There&#x27;s already existing technologies like python&#x2F;ruby for fast development, java&#x2F;groovy for stability and groovy for modern features, and finally golang which is really good for concurrency and building web related microservices. Golang in particular is nice because it solves issues like python&#x27;s slowness and it&#x27;s slimmer than java in many ways. And these solutions are already pretty good. It&#x27;s not like it&#x27;s all that hard to write a backend. Like the productivity gains from js to typescript are huge because js can be bad enough that there&#x27;s a lot of room for improvement. Whereas how much faster and MORE productive can someone really be in elixir?<p>And I am not even going to get into functional programming which is a whole other beast. It requires significantly different style of thinking, making a lot of my experience less valuable, I don&#x27;t think it solves solutions for an oop system that&#x27;s well designed, and often times the implementation can be bad if the right tools aren&#x27;t there. From my limited experience, FP provides some really powerful features, but at the builtin cost of being more rigid when I don&#x27;t need it to be.