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uncircle 2 days ago

All languages are a wasteland of abandoned packages, i.e. there is a very long tail of stuff no one has maintained for years. It’s all relative to the mindshare. For its size, Elixir is doing quite well.

mrcwinn 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

It's not the long tail. It's that the HEAD of packages in Elixir are also often poorly maintained or not maintained. The fundamental question for any developer: can I be productive quickly? Despite all that Elixir has going for it, the answer is often "no."

Want a first-party client library for the service you're using? Typically the answer is "too bad, Elixir developer." And writing your own Finch or Req wrapper for their REST endpoint simply isn't a valid answer.

>For its size, Elixir is doing quite well.

I'm actually arguing the opposite. Elixir is not doing well because of its size. So how can that be influenced and changed?

prophesi 2 days ago | parent [-]

What packages in Elixir have you found unmaintained/missing in the ecosystem? Genuinely curious.

AlchemistCamp 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Probably the highest profile and most consistent example would be Stripe. The most popular Stripe wrapper for Elixir’s docs point to a 2019 Stripe API version: https://github.com/beam-community/stripity-stripe

Worse still, the quality of Stripe’s own docs have really degraded this decade for anyone not using a language they have an SDK for. Most of their newer docs assume m have a drop-down toggle for on backend language with a few popular languages and no option for “other”. Example: https://docs.stripe.com/billing/quickstart

None of this is a fault of anyone working on Elixir or Phoenix but it definitely has an effect of discouraging some of the fledgling entrepreneur types who Elixir would otherwise be a near perfect fit for, as Rails was in the late aughts.

movedx01 a day ago | parent | prev [-]

anything OAuth

uncircle a day ago | parent [-]

There is an excellent (maintained, funded, audited AND with official certification) erlang/Elixir library for that: https://github.com/erlef/oidcc

I have just shipped a production service centered around OAuth and interfacing with OpenID Connect servers.

erichocean 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Most languages require maintenance.

Some languages—Clojure is a good example—have packages from 10 years ago, entirely unmaintained, that still work great because no maintenance is needed.

arrowsmith 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

This is also true for Elixir though. A lot of "unmaintained" Elixir packages still work fine.

sodapopcan 2 days ago | parent [-]

That's their point (I think, lol).

spiderice 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

In my experience, Elixir is very much on that end of the spectrum as well. I'm wondering if GGP just considers packages that don't have updates for 6 months as "unmaintained" or "dead" because they come from Javascript world where everything is, well... you know.

21 hours ago | parent | next [-]
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debo_ 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Broken and deprecated from inception?