What does HackerNews think of mint?

First of all: this example is a one-off script, so error handling is not as much of a concern (you'll notice the first expression installs packages, this is not how production apps should handle dependencies).

Second, functions that raise always end in `!` in Elixir, or at least they are supposed to. Most have alternatives that return error tuples instead which you can pattern match on (this is what I recommend). You'll hear "let it crash" a lot as it applies to Erlang/OTP programming (and by extension Elixir), and this is a good high-level organizing principle. You shouldn't go out of your way to program against the unknown in Elixir. However, HTTP requests failing is common enough that in my opinion at least you really should just check the error. You can read the docs for `get/2` (as opposed to `get!/2` which raises) here: https://hexdocs.pm/req/Req.html#get/2.

A common pattern is for the `!` version to call the version that doesn't raise, check the result, and raise on error, which is the case here: https://github.com/wojtekmach/req/blob/9de30de0df481ee557ccc...

> and if "body" is JSON, how do you even get the raw body, or can you?

You would set `decode: false` when calling `get!/2: https://hexdocs.pm/req/Req.html#new/1. You can also set this as configuration with https://hexdocs.pm/req/Req.html#default_options/1.

As a closing note I'll mention that Req is intended to be a very high-level, scripting-friendly requests library, similar to Requests in Python (the author also mentions in the OP that his use case is scripting). If you don't want conveniences like Req provides, you can either turn them off or use something different, like Finch (which Req is based on, https://github.com/sneako/finch).

Other than Req and Finch I'm personally only familiar with HTTPoison, which is significantly older than all of the libraries derived from Mint (like Finch and Req, https://github.com/elixir-mint/mint) but is very popular and still works. There are many others though, like Gun and Tesla and such. I just think it's important for folks to know that this level of "magic" is far from the default in Elixir, but it's there if you want it.