> Honestly, I hope more development goes into making Phoenix/Elixir/OTP easier, more complete, more expressive, more productive, more testable, and more performant to the point that it's a safe and usable choice for students, hobbyists, startups, megacorps, and anyone else doing web, non-web, big data, and/or AI stuff.
Seriously, this has been the case all the time. It's a great fit for AI, web (Phoenix), non-web (Nerves), students (Pragstudio), hobbyists (hi), megacorps (Discord, bleachereport).
What do you mean it's not testable, productive, expressive enough? Do you mean the entire elixir community is just fiddling about with unsafe software?
This comment seems just like a giant ragebait.
Although, what parts of Elixir itself are rough or missing creature comforts? I generally feel it's stable and fine, but I admittedly haven't written Elixir code in a couple of years, sadly.
I mean this describes every full stack web framework right? Like sure if the underlying language doesn't have macros or macro-like tools that limits how perverted the syntax can get but the line between "DSL" and "API" gets really blurry in all of these massive frameworks.
Wherever rails or phoenix has macro-defined syntax to handle a specific task, laravel or whatever will have a collection of related functions that need to be used in very specific ways to accomplish the same thing. Whether this collection is a "class" with an "api" or whether it is a "language" defined around this "domain" you will have the abstraction and the complexity.
Having a preference for one approach of managing this abstraction & complexity seems fine but "a collection of DSLs" is pretty much what a web framework is so that can't be the problem here.
You mean in the sense that the language's built-in syntax and available abstractions get abused so much that it approximates a DSL?
With macros, even language servers may need customization if they introduce new syntax. The code that runs doesn't exist until it runs, so you can't see it ahead of time.
This doesn't sound like too big a problem if you're familiar with the tooling already, but trying to figure out where some random method comes from in a rails code base when you're new to Ruby is somewhere between a nightmare and impossible without debugging and using the repl to tell you where the source is.
React has a JSX macro, and I love using it, so there's definitely room for them. There is a world of difference in developer experience when macros are used versus when not, however, and it is wrong to say that it is all the same.
It's kind of the standard way to paper over the protocol grit of HTTP and make people able to quickly pump out fresh plumbing between outbound socket and database.
The idea that Phoenix is also mostly macros does not hold in practice. Last time this came up, I believe less than 5% of Phoenix' public API turned out to be macros. You get this impression because the initial skeleton it generates has the endpoint and the router, which are macro heavy, but once you start writing the actual application logic, your context, your controllers, and templates are all regular functions.
no, but the Framework does push you into using them. A good example is the `use MyAppWeb` pattern. That's a macro that nests other macros. the good news is that you can pretty much excise that and everything works fine, and LLMs have no problem even! (i think they slightly prefer it)
a few cognitive pain points with phoenix macros:
plug: (love it dearly) but a bit confusing that it creates a conn variable out of whole cloth. a minor complaint. worth it, otherwise.
phoenix.router: is a plug but isnt quite a plug.
anyways that's it! the rest is ~fabulous. i think to find a framework where you have two minor complaints is a blessing. remember how activerecord automagically pluralized tables for you?
Conn is just a pipeline of functions, the initial Conn struct is created at request time and passed through to each function in the pipeline.
> I believe less than 5% of Phoenix' public API turned out to be macros.
The idea may still be right, but I'm curious if that addresses the majority of the public API that users are greeted with. I have unfortunately not written Elixir in a few years (cries), and I've never fully grokked Phoenix, so perhaps I'm still wrong.
I don't know how you can say this honestly - it was turbulent and fraught with trouble and angst. It most certainly was NOT handled well.
Python 3 was really, really needed to fix things in 2. Hence 2 became 3. They managed it pretty well, vaguely similar to Go, with automated update tools and compatibility-ish layers. It had its speed bumps and breakages as not everything went smoothly.
OTOH: Ruby 3 went the wrong way with types separate files and fragmentation of tools. And that's not mention having to opt-in with boilerplate to change how String literals work. Or: gem signing exists but is optional, not centrally-managed, and little-used. Or: Ruby Central people effectively stole some gems because Shopify said so. PS: many years ago Hiroshi Shibata blocked me from all GH Ruby contributions for asking a clarifying question in an issue for no reason. It seemed agro, unwarranted, and abrupt. So the rubygems repository fragment drama seems like the natural conclusion of unchecked power abuse lacking decorum and fairness, so I don't bother with Ruby much these days because Rust, TS, and more exist. When any individual or group believe they're better than everyone else, conflict is almost certainly inevitable. No matter how "good" a platform is, bad governance with unchecked conduct will torpedo it. PSA: Seek curious, cooperative, and professional folks with mature conflict-resolution skills.
It's a good idea™ to think deeply and carefully and experiment with language tool design in the real world before inflicting permanent, terrible choices rather than net worse, painful ones. PSA: Please be honest, thoughtful, clear, and communicate changes in advance so they can be avoided or minimized to inflict least pain.
Honestly, I hope more development goes into making Phoenix/Elixir/OTP easy, complete, expressive, productive, testable, and performant to the point that it's a safe and usable choice for students, hobbyists, startups, megacorps, and anyone else doing web, non-web, big data, and/or AI stuff.
Plug for https://livebook.dev, an app that brings Elixir workbooks to a desktop near you. And https://exercism.org/tracks/elixir