To be honest with you, "for my next startup" strikes me as the absolute worst time to use a language/platform that is both new to you and new to the industry.
Delays kill startups, and that just begs for delays. You have to learn the language. All your new engineers have to learn it. You'll inevitably be (re)inventing the wheel because Elixir isn't in production at thousands of companies already.
Picking a shitty, slow language, as long as it's a popular one (JavaScript, Java, C#, PHP, Python), is going to have a much better cost/benefit profile.
> Picking a shitty, slow language, as long as it's a popular one (JavaScript, Java, C#, PHP, Python), is going to have a much better cost/benefit profile.
Although, keep in mind that a startup is going to be a roller coaster ride for years. You'll have days when you get tired of writing financial models for investors, or when an angry email from a customer ruins your mood, or you hit a road-block with a UI that just doesn't feel right. You'll want to take a break from all that by going back to just writing code for a day or two. At that point, you will want to get pleasure out coding. I'll be very unhappy if after those kind of days, I try to find solace in coding, and I see PHP, JavaScript or Java staring back at me.
Compared to the years it takes to turn a startup successful, the time needed to learn a new language well enough is negligible. I knew just basic Ruby when I switched to Ruby + Sinatra from Java for my new startup. Now, three years later, I can't be happier I made the switch.
Failing fast isn't easy if you're also learning a new language. You want to go from zero to product as soon as possible, and that means using a language you already know like the back of your hand, even if that language sucks.
For your first couple programming languages, it's intimidating to learn a new language. Once you're experienced, though, you discover that its easy and quick to pick up new languages.
Because my experience is, as I related above, even though I was learning elixir (for real, I had dabbled with it before) an building a team from scratch, we delivered a product extremely fast.... because we chose elixir.
It doesn't matter how well you know java, the language is going to slow down your development dramatically... at lest compared to Elixir (and maybe go.)
Not necessarily. I don't go from zero to product till I have verified that there's a need for the product. I try to fail fast before developing the product. By the time I'm developing the product, I'm fairly certain it's not going to fail immediately after launch. Oh, and once you've built a product that people are using and you're going after growth, you would rarely get a chance to switch languages or frameworks. So, then, you're stuck with the language that you don't even like anymore for many years.
I think you're also over-estimating the time required to learn a new language to be good enough for most startups. I understand that there are some areas where language mastery will be tremendous benefit. In that case, I agree that switching languages may not be such a good idea. But, that's a special case, IMHO.
Nope. And I have real world experience to contradict that.
Last year started a project with elixir, about 8 months before elixir hit 1.0. Despite starting with me and another engineer we both built a team, taught them elixir (the ones who didn't already know) and got a product to production within about 5 months[1].
Erlang is not new. It has been around for over 20 years. I don't think we needed to, but if there weren't an elixir library for what we needed, we had erlang libraries to fall back on. Our "new engineers" were often attracted to us BECAUSe we chose elixir. It took about a week for us to get new engineers productive with elixir (we hired good people, though).
You're over estimating the benefit of libraries and way underestimating the benefit of a really good language/platform.... and elixir/erlang is that.
It's a lot faster to create a given amount of functionality in Elixir, and then a lot faster to debug it and extend it.
And then, after making the choice to stick with an "established" language, companies are shackled to it forever, hiring people who already like that language and so they never leverage newer better ways of doing things.
[1] That was a year and several months ago that it went live. Five months may seem long, but this was a from-scratch ecommerce in a highly regulated industry involving a great deal of pulling customer records during the purchase process, with a parent company that didn't understand the concept of specs and kept changing it's mind on what it wanted. We were about %30 faster than a comparable other project at this company.
Yes, you're absolutely right. Which is why I'm extremely conflicted right now. I definitely like what I'm seeing with Elixir/Phoenix, but should I take the risk or not is a really tough question. It is performant and fault tolerant, so for a startup if that means it can reduce our operational, and support, cost that itself would be a huge win. Deployment seems straight forward, much much simpler than what I had to do with a Rails app that I was experimenting with. Go deployment would be easier, but Elixir seems at worst to be inline with Play/Java (running under Play and not tomcat). There is a huge set of libraries should I need to venture outside Elixir and into Erlang, and moreover I think (not 100% sure) that Erlang can easily call into other language libraries which might come in handy.
The way I'm looking at it is implementing small examples in a couple of other options, such as Nodejs/Loopback and Java/Play and then comparing them. So far Elixir/Phoenix seems straightforward and productive, but still evaluating.
However, even if Elixir/Phoenix is the best thing since sliced bread, hiring and training is indeed going to be an issue so I've been trying to figure out how to solve than conundrum.
Built a team from 2 people to 12 in 2014, starting 8 months before elixir hit 1.0 and didn't have trouble. We attracted a number of people simply because we were using elixir. We also got a number of people who were interested in functional programming.
Really, language should never be a barrier to hiring... a good engineer will want to learn a new language, and in my opinion, the really good engineers are already erlang programmers.
The biggest barrier to hiring, in my experience building a team for an elixir project, was medieval HR practices. ("oh you can't hire him, cause he wants a plane ticket reimbursed for relocating across the country. He's being greedy." Seriously.)
One counter point is the "Python Paradox"[1], though I don't know how well that conjecture was ever actually supported. However, isn't the Elixir/OTP ecosphere considered relatively practical and tested, rather than just esoteric or purist, even if it is new?
I can't speak to Elixir/OTP, as I've not -yet- used Elixir. However, every time I've gone to use something in the Erlang/OTP standard library [0] it has always been far less complicated and far more well designed than I feared it was going to be.
Maybe this is a reflection of my pessimism, but I feel that it is actually a reflection of the quality of the software. :)
[0] Yes, I know that Elixir is a BEAM language and -as such- has access to both Erlang and OTP, so this distinction is terribly fine. ;)
When PG says "smarter engineers", it isn't a given that there are more of them or that it matters that they're smart.
Many startups don't need top-tier engineers. They need productive, numerous engineers, especially at the beginning when hiring anyone is difficult (let alone someone good).
It really depends on the startup. For some form of chat application or distributed system he will find himself reinventing less compared to the competition. Would be a great way to beat the averages :)
I do not agree, I have worked for a year on a startup using Clojure(Script) and I hadn't touched Clojure before. Never looked back and did not encounter any major issues springing from the choice of language. To the contrary, I have really enjoyed not having to deal with the disadvatages of older languages. The issue could possibly be in hiring, if the supply of Elixir-developers would be scarce.
Kind of, since Elixir runs on the Erlang VM and it uses much of Erlang's libraries (e.g. OTP) I'd argue that you can look at Erlang's track record for Elixir's.
I worked for thredup.com when it was brand-new and we used Rails when it was still fairly new and we had a pretty good time all things considered. You just have to be a capable programmer. ;)
That list of languages was "popular" rather than "shitty and slow", although some of them certainly are shitty (and dynamic languages do tend to be kinda slow). I realize my phrasing was confusing.
Delays kill startups, and that just begs for delays. You have to learn the language. All your new engineers have to learn it. You'll inevitably be (re)inventing the wheel because Elixir isn't in production at thousands of companies already.
Picking a shitty, slow language, as long as it's a popular one (JavaScript, Java, C#, PHP, Python), is going to have a much better cost/benefit profile.