Elixir for Humans Who Know Python
My perhaps slightly biased input on Python vs. Elixir (I worked with Python for different projects for a couple years, and have been using Elixir full-time for ~1.5 years).<p>Elixir as a core technology for application development (as opposed to data science&#x2F;ML&#x2F;AI - it’s still early days for Nx&#x2F;Axon&#x2F;etc.) is better than Python in just about every way that matters; e.g. immutability by default eliminating whole classes (no pun intended) of bugs, having the full power of OTP available if you need a distributed system, more convergence around libraries and frameworks (to the point that José Valim also works on Phoenix, LiveView, Nx, etc., not to mention having Mix, EEx, and ExUnit built in).<p>I do wish Elixir had significant whitespace rather than do&#x2F;end, but that’s not a hill I’m willing to die on…<p>My one major gripe with Elixir’s ecosystem compared to Python’s is that, IMO, Django would have been a better source of inspiration for a dominant Web framework compared to Rails; Django’s model layer is top-notch, with all your basic model information for an app contained in one models.py file. In Rails and Phoenix, you don’t get auto-migrations out of the box for simple use cases, and your model layer ends up being distributed across schema&#x2F;ActiveRecord files, a “structure.sql” or “schema.rb” file, and the migrations. In my real-world use, this has been… “sub-optimal” compared to Django, to the point that I sometimes dream about building my own Django-ish framework for Elixir. Django+Django REST Framework are that good - if you stick with Python and are not using them already, do yourself a favor and check them out.<p>Also, Django’s admin is old, crusty tech, but it does what it set out to do really well.<p>I will admit Django’s implicit queries can cause DB performance issues, I wish there was an explicit analogue to Ecto’s Repo.* functions to force devs to think about when to make the DB call.