[HN Gopher] Embracing open data with Elixir
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Embracing open data with Elixir
Author : thibaut_barrere
Score : 73 points
Date : 2021-11-16 13:18 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (elixir-lang.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (elixir-lang.org)
| thibaut_barrere wrote:
| Member of the team here: happy to answer any question you may
| have.
| weatherlight wrote:
| What was the hardest part of adopting elixir?
| thibaut_barrere wrote:
| There are many different ways to reply to that question :-)
|
| For me, as a Rubyist since 2004, the hardest part (by far)
| has been the incredible "comfort vendor lock-in" provided by
| Ruby. I have been working with Elixir since circa 2016, and
| only today I feel the same level of fluidity in the 2
| languages.
|
| This is not to say Elixir is hard to learn (this is not the
| case), but Ruby is incredibly sticky in that regard.
|
| On the project launch itself (started circa 2017), as
| described in the article and afaik, the team was largely free
| to pick their preferred stack, so there was no external
| pressure to avoid a "new" stack. I cannot comment on the
| friction they may have had at the time.
|
| A point of friction was how to "configure an app". Over the
| years, the way to configure an app in Elixir has evolved (and
| much improved), culminating with the latest
| "config/runtime.exs" which allows runtime overrides for both
| mix projects and releases. I consider the situation stable
| now, but we had to clean-up the code & the ways to handle
| that.
|
| Deployment is not perfect at the moment: we are using (for
| the sake of simplicity) a Docker-based approach, which helps
| us decide exactly which version of OTP/Elixir we want and
| deploy it almost anywhere. We will move to releases later
| (but first we had to clean-up the configuration system).
|
| XML processing is not super easy to achieve. Good libraries
| (e.g. saxy) have appeared, but you can feel you are not in
| .Net/Java.
|
| Recruiting is not a problem: most developers so far have been
| eager to level-up on Elixir, and a good developer won't have
| much trouble at this point of the Elixir story to get
| onboard.
|
| Lastly, before that project, in some enterprise contexts,
| Elixir was a harder sell compared to Java/Node (even if I
| managed to use it ultimately). You have to prove that the
| stack is reliable, will be there tomorrow, can compete with
| alternatives etc. It is better to use it in enterprise
| contexts where you are free to choose (or start using it for
| tooling/checks, before promoting it to larger projects).
|
| If you have more specific questions, let me know :-)
| weatherlight wrote:
| That was very comprehensive! Thanks!
| yurishimo wrote:
| Where/how are you hosting the Elixir applications? Where would
| you recommend a beginner to the language to host an elixir web
| app for free/low-cost?
| conradfr wrote:
| Gigalixir has as free tier.
| Zababa wrote:
| No specific questions, but I want to say that I feel a bit of
| pride for my country when I see stuff like that. Thank you for
| your work!
| thibaut_barrere wrote:
| Thank you :-)
|
| There are a lot of interesting projects going on at Beta
| Gouv, a lot is happening!
|
| For more information, check out
| https://beta.gouv.fr/startups/
| [deleted]
| maelito wrote:
| Not mentioned in the article, but related : https://code.gouv.fr
| has just been launched (switch to English link in footer).
| yurishimo wrote:
| It loaded in English for me. Might be geo-location specific.
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(page generated 2021-11-17 23:02 UTC)