great article! so many times I caught myself saying ‘yes!’. thanks so much for writing this.

I’m of the firm opinion that Elixir is the going to be, for me, the main language for backend production systems for the next decade of my career–having tried PHP, Ruby, JS/Node, Java, Python, C/C++…it just feels right. But.

Buuuuut.

The thing that makes Elixir good beyond the points mentioned in this article is a pervasive conservatism and desire for quality, mostly because of its adjacency to Erlang/OTP and that community of responsible engineers solving unsexy problems. Elixir has adapted the (often clunky) tooling of Erlang and has done a lot to bring it up to standards developers expect in modern projects, but without going whole-hog new-shiny as we’ve seen with, say, ActiveRecord or Rails or Meteor or whatever else.

Except, that doesn’t last. As more and more developers (looking at you, Rails folks) come streaming in to get into the Next Big Thing, expect that conservatism to give way to poorly-written libraries, to new frameworks to give conference talks, and to code written in complete ignorance of the performance characteristics in the underlying system.

I’m currently neck-deep in a legacy Phoenix system (yes, such things do exist!), and I’ve seen (in our and others’ projects):

• Well-meaning developers using Verk (a port of Sidekiq/Resque, basically) for work queuing instead of just normal supervision trees
• Excessive use of tooling for hot code swapping/reloading just because Elixir/Erlang/OTP supports it, regardless of the cost when things don’t work correctly. Simpler deployment makes sense
• Pipeline operators used in place of bog-simple nested parens for arithmetic
• Pervasive use of maps where structs would be better typed and more reliable
• Pervasive use of string values where atoms would be more efficient
• Use of blind exception throwing instead of god-fearing Erlang {:ok, ... }, {:error, ... } tuples that can be handled correctly
• Overly-clever metaprogramming (I’m looking at you, Phoenix router)
• Ignorance of core Erlang documentation and features (docs, for some reason, not reliably included by the Elixir folks…probably to discourage their use)

And outside of that, I’ve seen a (subjectively) massive increase in the number of me-too and one-off projects on Hex that show that people are sharing buggy, poorly-tested libraries and others are piling on because Elixir is TEH NEW AWESOME.

I fully expect somebody (maybe @355e3b) to write something like “The Gentrification of Erlang/OTP” to explore this troubling trend further.