If you are an Elixir (or perhaps Clojure) expert, the following doesn't apply. But every other person jumping ship from, for example PHP or JavaScript should think twice.

I think Phoenix is overhyped a lot. The barrier to entry is gigantic. The lack of up-to-date resources doesn't help. It's definitely not as polished as Laravel for example.

And while there is Pragmatic Studio with their wonderful introduction video, there is nothing like Laracasts where there are new tutorials added all the time. Frankly, it's on another level.

Deploying Phoenix is a nightmare when compared to Laravel.

In Phx you have to reinvent a lot of things and often, of course, choosing the wrong path.

Sure try the chat demo apps Phx is famous for but beyond that it's a pain in the ass unless you are very good Elixir programmer and can bug fix and reinvent-the-wheel things out.

Also, Phoenix is bad in environments with bad wi-fi. Think halls, kitchens, factories. So, I wouldn't do a Phx app for some warehouse2customers type of operation a because there are some very interesting out of connection problems, the necessity to constantly ping/"hearbeat" home to the server.

For me it is a pass. The experience with 1.6 and 1.7 rc was bad.

P.S. One extremely important thing, PHP is made for sloppy web programmers (like me). It will forgive and brute-force-work like hell when needed. Elixir is less forgiving and you can shoot yourself in the foot much easier. That's why I prefer PHP - it's much easier to put up some website that works well even on a cheap hardware and then you can PHP-optimize and tinker if you want.

P.S.S. The speed thing is overhyped as well. PHP vs Elixir for web stuff is not as big difference. In Laravel - if you use PHP 8.2 and cache your views, routes, etc. the DB stuff is still the 80% of all of your problems, not the PHP or Laravel.

birracerveza

The only thing I can agree is deploying, which is pretty daunting compared to Laravel, but still feasible (unless you have the horrible idea of using mnesia, God help you then) but everything else? I have no idea what framework you've bee using.

>Elixir is less forgiving and you can shoot yourself in the foot much easier.

What? If anything it's the other way around. Elixir does not let you shoot yourself in the foot, it will crash and tell you why exactly it crashed. PHP will chug along and you won't even feel pain even though you don't have a leg anymore. That is NOT a good thing.

nix23

>unless you have the horrible idea of using mnesia

WhatsApp used (uses?) mnesia, what is the problem with it?

depr

If I recall correctly, if some node desyncs, it's hard to get it started again. You have to manually transfer the entire database from another node which can obviously take a long time if you have a large database. It doesn't really handle netsplits by itself (there's https://github.com/uwiger/unsplit) so you have to be prepared to do this yourself.