> I’m still looking back at Elixir with nostalgia, wondering if I’m going to have a chance to go back to it and really make it an extension of my arms/brain like Ruby had become.
You should give it another try. :)
You jumped in quite early, when we were still collectively figuring out what it meant to build Phoenix applications, and many things were in flush back then. You probably went through Ecto 1 -> 2 -> 3 and Phoenix was migrating to contexts.
But I also have to say there was a lot of FOMO in relation to OTP back then: people felt they had to build these amazing supervision designs, otherwise they were not using the language correctly. But the truth is that they are building blocks for frameworks and certain libraries, in the same way threads/mutexes are for other languages. Of course, GenServers are higher-level, more expressive, and bring more properties, but the overall idea is that they are about infrastructure, and not design. Phoenix, Ecto, Broadway, etc should be spawning 99% of the processes that you need for you.
> You probably went through Ecto 1 -> 2 -> 3 and Phoenix was migrating to contexts.
> But I also have to say there was a lot of FOMO in relation to OTP back then: people felt they had to build these amazing supervision designs, otherwise they were not using the language correctly.
Exactly!
Contexts really threw me off, because I couldn't figure out how/why would I set a boundary up front, if I'm not even sure how the app is going to turn out.
You should give it another try. :)
You jumped in quite early, when we were still collectively figuring out what it meant to build Phoenix applications, and many things were in flush back then. You probably went through Ecto 1 -> 2 -> 3 and Phoenix was migrating to contexts.
But I also have to say there was a lot of FOMO in relation to OTP back then: people felt they had to build these amazing supervision designs, otherwise they were not using the language correctly. But the truth is that they are building blocks for frameworks and certain libraries, in the same way threads/mutexes are for other languages. Of course, GenServers are higher-level, more expressive, and bring more properties, but the overall idea is that they are about infrastructure, and not design. Phoenix, Ecto, Broadway, etc should be spawning 99% of the processes that you need for you.