I've found that Elixir / Phoenix has given me the level of productivity / flexibility that Rails used to have. Perhaps it's not quite on the same level of productivity but long term maintainability seems to be easier in Phoenix, I think from the functional programming aspect / lack of magic.
Things I love about Phoenix over Rails:
- Background / periodic jobs are baked into the same runtime as the server. You can install Oban in about 5 minutes and have it generate periodic jobs without any messing around with additional Ruby processes or custom databases (i.e. Redis, although background jobs are great on Postgres these days)
- Anything real-time is given to you out of the box. Rails has ActionCable but like the background jobs above, it needs to be setup as a separate process. Livepage makes this very straight forward.
- Phoenix sacrifices some of Rails' magic for verbosity but I think that's a better trade off long term.
Things I love about Phoenix over Rails:
- Background / periodic jobs are baked into the same runtime as the server. You can install Oban in about 5 minutes and have it generate periodic jobs without any messing around with additional Ruby processes or custom databases (i.e. Redis, although background jobs are great on Postgres these days)
- Anything real-time is given to you out of the box. Rails has ActionCable but like the background jobs above, it needs to be setup as a separate process. Livepage makes this very straight forward.
- Phoenix sacrifices some of Rails' magic for verbosity but I think that's a better trade off long term.
Things I've loved about Rails:
- The eco system.