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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!

3 comments

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