@blakeyrat said in Zed Shaw VS Phoenix/Elixir:

If it's "not yet mature enough", that's not the poor user's fault.

Well, it depends what for really. Much software is fine for an expert to set up, but horrible for a noob. I just don't get excited about that.

However…

I've just gone and read the website on Phoenix/ Elixir , and it seems they're in the uncanny valley of documentation. It's just good enough to draw you in and think it might be good without having actually had a lot of battle-tested experience from dealing with new users actually applied to it. The installation page seems a little bit daunting (a pre-built VM image would be a way for them to address this, but they've not done it so far as I can tell). There's a bunch of guides on what to do, but they're still lost a bit in the weeds: nothing actually explains the model of what's going on, there's no map to the functionality and you're left wondering what now. The style is fine, the low-level content is bitty, and the high-level content just isn't there (or if it is, I didn't see it).

So… documentation needs a lot more work. I don't know about the code — I can't be bothered to actually run it, as it doesn't actually solve any of my current problems — but if the Phoenix/Elixir guys read this, here's a tip: make sure your error messages always get logged by default, and always say what is wrong in terms that let someone figure out how to fix the problem. Indeed, that's a piece of advice to anyone making a framework for anything; for ${DEITY}'s sake, make it debuggable! Don't rely on the user getting it right or knowing exactly what your internal architecture is.

I can see why Zed was getting frustrated. I just think that getting abusive after just one day is unprofessional. And no, I'm not going to contribute any fixes because I have my own stuff to do. I'm not really a big fan of the sort of approach that Elixir seems to take, but that might just be me.