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Rails has more baked in for the typical crud app. Example:

Try to create a way for people to upload documents like images and PDFs and documents. Okay easy enough on both platforms and I want you to generate a preview for each of those files so that people can easily find those files. Now I want you to add pagination. Now I want you to add column sorting so that people can sort by file size or by name or by upload date. Finally I want you to add a search field. Going by the way all of this stuff needs to live in the URL so that you can bookmark all the different you know choices you've made.

The stuff is pretty trivial and rails but in elixir you would have to bake it all yourself very boring code that doesn't really matter. This is why I chose to build my startups admin dashboard in rails despite our main production API being an elixir.



LiveView uploads are baked in, previews and all. Everything else you list is included in the Flop library, if you want something off the shelf. In rails you are still including Kaminari or whatever other gems for all this too, so this is really no different.


Check out ash-hq.org they are basically building the data side framework to handle all those things and it works great with Phoenix.


Extremely risky tbh I would have an extremely hard time if I go off path or need to hire someone. It would be almost negligence to choose it unfortunately


It's the opposite since it standardises everything as oppose to roll your own.

If you need to hire someone you'd need to train them on your system no matter what, with a framework you can use their documentation to explain where things are and how they work.


Elixir is already a small fraction of a small and shrinking community (Rails). Ash is a tiny fraction of an already tiny fraction. I cannot imagine defending this choice to anyone unless I was literally the CEO of a company and answered only to myself.

Ash does look badass though!


Elixir really needs to lose the perception, if there is one, of it being a subset of the Ruby/Rails community. It's true that the initial influx of Elixir developers came from the Ruby world back when Elixir was new, but that was a long time ago. Tons of Elixir folk come into it nowadays without a Ruby background.

Elixir and Ruby really aren't that similar anyway. The syntax differences are very superficial - Elixir's a functional language with very style and semantics to Ruby, and that's even before you get into the magic of OTP and the BEAM, for which Ruby has nothing comparable.


I didn't mean that elixir engineers all come from Ruby I was just using Ruby as an example sample size because that is what I'm familiar with.


It doesn't really matter though. You have to train new staff on your systems/code base no matter what you use. So if they don't already know ash it's the exact same as if you didn't use it. Only now you can point them at the ash docs and buy them the ash book and they'll know where everything in your system goes.


I've been using Elixir for over 10 years, if it was ever a "small fraction of the Rails community" it was during its formative years only. Elixir is fully its own thing. We don't even really talk about Ruby? I really do think you've got a mixed up perception on that front


Even José himself says that Ruby's influence on Elixir is overstated: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36604054




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