Is Elixir really the general purpose productivity tool that comments here (and on other HN posts) make it out to be?
I've loved playing with Erlang and Elixir. The concurrency model and approach to failure are fascinating and clearly powerful for certain problems. Elixir's Pheonix feels as productive as Rails. I've read most of Joe Armstrong's books and watched most of his talks.
However, I feel like I can throw my daily driver programming languages including Go, Ruby, Rust... even Haskell at any problem and give or take performance, come out the other end with high quality software at scale.
When I last wrote Elixir, it felt great when I was doing basic Rails shaped work or lower level concurrency heavy networking (I was playing with TUN/TAP interfaces), but I really can't imagine it as a general purpose programming language.
For example I can't imagine scripting in Elixir, but I can and do in the other languages mentioned above. Also I remember trying to write a parser library and it felt way more verbose and unmaintainable than the equivalent Haskell or Rust.
This is hand wavy, but does anyone feel what I'm getting at? Any thoughts?
I've loved playing with Erlang and Elixir. The concurrency model and approach to failure are fascinating and clearly powerful for certain problems. Elixir's Pheonix feels as productive as Rails. I've read most of Joe Armstrong's books and watched most of his talks.
However, I feel like I can throw my daily driver programming languages including Go, Ruby, Rust... even Haskell at any problem and give or take performance, come out the other end with high quality software at scale.
When I last wrote Elixir, it felt great when I was doing basic Rails shaped work or lower level concurrency heavy networking (I was playing with TUN/TAP interfaces), but I really can't imagine it as a general purpose programming language.
For example I can't imagine scripting in Elixir, but I can and do in the other languages mentioned above. Also I remember trying to write a parser library and it felt way more verbose and unmaintainable than the equivalent Haskell or Rust.
This is hand wavy, but does anyone feel what I'm getting at? Any thoughts?