mkohlmyr

I've been looking at Elixir more and more over the last few weeks since it seems to incorporate many of the things I find lacking in Python. So far the only real hurdle was that I found the introduction text a little obtuse when it came to Mix and OTP (I'm often slow to get through introductory guides, since I'm a learn-by-doing person).

Would love to hear from other people who have come from a JavaScript / Python heavy background what their experience has been with the language. Or from people who do web development in general if they feel its a good fit.

rubiquity
I was primarily a Ruby programmer so before I dove into Elixir I mostly wrote Sinatra and Rails apps, and occasionally some Node.js. When I first came to Elixir I mostly approached it as a fun thing to do in my spare time. The language really has some great features for solving problems in concise ways. But as I've spent more and more time with the language I've started to realize it can replace far more of the projects that I used to use Ruby for than I first though.

I've worked on a couple projects in Elixir already. I do still like Ruby/Rails for rendering HTML (there's years of hard work in making that an easy thing to do in Rails), so a common web app that I create lately will be Rails as a very thing wrapper around the database for rendering HTML and then an Elixir component for background jobs and WebSockets.

That said, a ton of great work is going into Phoenix[0] and I think it's very close to being suitable for both rendering HTML and WebSockets. On my next project I'll probably try and just use Phoenix entirely.

0 - https://github.com/phoenixframework/phoenix