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Re:Ask HN: Are you satisfied with Elixir or do you regret ch... by AlchemistCamp on Tuesday May 18, 2021 @10:24AM (#27194967)
What do you think has been the difficulty for people at your company learning it?

I encounter a lot of devs, especially experienced devs who pick it up very rapidly compared to what I've ever seen with JavaScript, ObjC, Rust or other most other languages I've spent time with.

Re:Ask HN: Are you satisfied with Elixir or do you regret ch... by pavel_lishin on Tuesday May 18, 2021 @11:12AM (#27195705)
For simple things like "add field to GraphQL schema, hook it up to a resolver, and read some data from the database" - doesn't take too long.

The language itself is very different from the C-like imperative languages most everyone knows, so there's a bit of a ramp-up from that, but for basics, people can be released into the codebase within a month.

But when things go wrong, or when you need to do something more complicated, things get difficult. It's much more difficult to google around for solutions. When Dialyzer is spitting out strange errors, hunting down their causes and solutions is challenging without someone who understands it around.

I feel like 99% of Typescript/Ruby problems have been encountered and enshrined in Stack Overflow and the like, but Elixir doesn't have that sort of volume.

It's a fun language, and worth learning, and I played around with it in a side project, but quickly started running into conceptual roadblocks when it came to (no surpise) the GenServer stuff, and how to actually spin up a stable service that does things in some given way. I probably could have stuck with it, but at that point it felt more like toil than joy, so I decided I'd rather do something else with my time. I'd be fine with going to work for another company working with Elixir, provided that there were people there who can swoop in from above and help me solve my problems.