
A beginner's explanation for why Elixir isn't more popular - bobbyz
I&#x27;ve been tinkering around with Elixir and Phoenix Liveview for a day and a half now and I&#x27;m beginning to understand why it isn&#x27;t more popular. Sure, the syntax looks as if it were developed in a vacuum, but I can get used to that eventually. The real reason is the docs suck. Not the docs for the language or the Phoenix framework, but the docs for all the little surrounding libraries you&#x27;ll need for every project. The docs for Goth (GCP authentication) were very lacking and I&#x27;ve spent the entire day trying to make a POST request with HTTPoison and I just cannot get it to work. It seems like the correct response is being received but there seems to be the wrong number of params or something. I can literally see the response on the error page, but the program refuses to accept it. The only relevant example in the repo is a GET request and it does not appear to work for POST, and there doesn&#x27;t seem to be any relevant answers on SO. I feel like if it takes a day to figure out how to make a POST request work it cancels out the supposed benefits you get down the road no matter how great they are. At this point, it seems the practical next move would be to just do it in python (or node.js). The docs for python aren&#x27;t great either (a beginner would struggle to install pip), but you generally won&#x27;t get stuck for days on trivial problems. Unless that becomes the case for Elixir, I can&#x27;t imagine it being a mainstream language.
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manusachi
> I can't imagine it being a mainstream language. So you are looking for next
> "mainstream", like what Ruby on Rails was 10 years ago. Seems like during
> this last 10 years web-service development technologies got diversified a
> lot. While in 2008 web-applications written in functional programming
> languages such as Haskell, Closure, Scala or lower level languages like Go
> or Rust was something exotic, now it's becoming normal, not trendy, but
> normal IMHO =)

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bigbassroller
> It seems like the correct response is being received but there seems to be
> the wrong number of params or something.

Thats because you have to pattern match based on params and arity.

