I'm in the fourth month of a Phoenix project, which shields me from almost all of OTP, and I agree with your point. Maybe even "Erlang with a Ruby syntax" would be too much. Similarities with Ruby don't go any further than "def" "do" "end" and many library modules and functions deliberately named to mimic corresponding modules and methods in Ruby. Everything else is different, both syntax and semantic.
After 10 years of Rails, all things considered Elixir and Phoenix are pretty good.
The best feature of the language so far is pattern matching. It can be used in the arguments of function definitions. It makes all the "if"s go away. It seems strange after 30 years of programming, but a program without conditionals is easier to read.
Not having to use an external background job framework is great news too. Just spawn your processes to send a mail, process something asynchronously and store the result in the database. No Sidekiq (or Celery if you're into Python.)
On the awful side, Ecto is too low level and it feels like a self inflicted pain. I understand the reasons behind its design decisions, but the typical web application or mobile backend don't need all of that. Actually the team working with me on this project wrote a lot of code to build queries and wrap them into another layer to return {:ok, result} / {:error, reason} tuples. We're calling them from controllers more or less as Model.get_something(args). I checked it now and we have zero occurrences of " from " in controller code. All the queries are confined inside a model. If we were using Rails ActiveRecord would have written all that code for us. Instead we had to use a more verbose query syntax, write our functions and tests. This is a net loss of productivity.
There are some modules that can be mounted on the top of Ecto to make it look like ActiveRecord or other ORMs for other languages. I'm looking forward to using Ecto.Rut in my next project. I hope I'll never have to use Ecto directly.
https://github.com/sheharyarn/ecto_rut
We almost didn't use the supervisor layer of the language (somewhat like systemd/init for who's not familiar with it.) I used it in smaller projects and I feel like it's a little too complicated. Same for defining a GenServer, more complex and verbose than exposing the same functionality with methods from a object. I know we have to split the code between what runs in the client process and what runs on the server process, but I feel there should be a vanilla GenServer that handles the most straightfoward case inside the behavior, which is no code in the client with the exception of passing the arguments to the server. Maybe use the name, sigils or module attributes to declare if there will be a synchronous return value.
Anyway, Elixir is still young and there is time to smooth the rough edges. So far it's an acceptable contender and definitely better than the popular scripting languages when concurrency is important.
After 10 years of Rails, all things considered Elixir and Phoenix are pretty good.
The best feature of the language so far is pattern matching. It can be used in the arguments of function definitions. It makes all the "if"s go away. It seems strange after 30 years of programming, but a program without conditionals is easier to read.
Not having to use an external background job framework is great news too. Just spawn your processes to send a mail, process something asynchronously and store the result in the database. No Sidekiq (or Celery if you're into Python.)
On the awful side, Ecto is too low level and it feels like a self inflicted pain. I understand the reasons behind its design decisions, but the typical web application or mobile backend don't need all of that. Actually the team working with me on this project wrote a lot of code to build queries and wrap them into another layer to return {:ok, result} / {:error, reason} tuples. We're calling them from controllers more or less as Model.get_something(args). I checked it now and we have zero occurrences of " from " in controller code. All the queries are confined inside a model. If we were using Rails ActiveRecord would have written all that code for us. Instead we had to use a more verbose query syntax, write our functions and tests. This is a net loss of productivity.
There are some modules that can be mounted on the top of Ecto to make it look like ActiveRecord or other ORMs for other languages. I'm looking forward to using Ecto.Rut in my next project. I hope I'll never have to use Ecto directly.
https://github.com/sheharyarn/ecto_rut
We almost didn't use the supervisor layer of the language (somewhat like systemd/init for who's not familiar with it.) I used it in smaller projects and I feel like it's a little too complicated. Same for defining a GenServer, more complex and verbose than exposing the same functionality with methods from a object. I know we have to split the code between what runs in the client process and what runs on the server process, but I feel there should be a vanilla GenServer that handles the most straightfoward case inside the behavior, which is no code in the client with the exception of passing the arguments to the server. Maybe use the name, sigils or module attributes to declare if there will be a synchronous return value.
Anyway, Elixir is still young and there is time to smooth the rough edges. So far it's an acceptable contender and definitely better than the popular scripting languages when concurrency is important.