Crappy ecosystems

I recently complained in a programming community about the troubles of upgrading a React Native project to a new version and how everything breaks hilariously. Also that this situation is the absolute same as it was in ye olden times of Node when I was suffering under Angular 1 and Ionic. Or Phonegap. The churn is massive. The mobile end of things introduces more things that make the already fragile stack fall over at the slightest touch of the dependency tree(s).

And someone got in there to defend the folder node_modules because it was fine in their experience. Maybe they thought my issue was with the need to blow away node_modules to get things working. It was not. I don't have a beef with the folder. I have a beef with the experience of using every part of the Node ecosystem I've ever been exposed to. I get being defensive when confronted with this, I do. We'll get there.

Similar defensiveness is common when criticizing PHP. And honestly that's very fair. Ever since the post PHP - A fractal of bad design made the rounds it has been fashionable to beat up on PHP devs. I've done a ton of PHP and I have my personal love/hate with it. Most critics are rude about it and either haven't used it or are high on their new horse. As I have been. It is reasonable that PHP devs are sore about it and they have been clapping back about getting stuff done and being not-so-fancy. And the language is better now they say. I say worse because it is C# and Java now. Modern PHP is a strange beast.

Overall, PHP was never flimsy in the way the Node ecosystem in my experience. I can't speak to composer or the package management because I've used it very little. 

They seem to have won a lot of new respect as an indie hacking / startup tool with Laravel getting popular. This makes it unfashionable to dismiss out of hand again.

The Elixir community also gets blanket criticisms that we get defensive about and dismiss. No-one uses it. There are no jobs. It doesn't have static typing. There are not enough libraries for common needs. Hate to hear it. Time to argue.

We know that plenty of folks use it. The language is not esoteric or a curiosity. There are not a ton of jobs but I know so many people that do work exclusively in Elixir that I don't sweat either of those statements. I think these are useful as a sorting mechanism. People that worry a  lot about future employability in that way might not enjoy the current Elixir world which does require a bit of effort to get work in.

It doesn't have static typing. For a long time I dismissed this because I don't care about static typing. This is still largely my stance for Elixir. I've seen benefit from static typing in Elm so I get what people want it for, to some extent. With the introduction of gradual typing we'll see if this contingent starts to care for the language or moves on to another criticism.

We don't have enough libraries and that becomes bothersome. I didn't find this true until I did. I think we dismiss this aggressively while it is really, probably, one of the biggest challenges of a mid-size community and ecosystem like Elixir. I just found out that someone had forked bolt-sips which was the outdated neo4j-library and there is now boltx which seems capable of v5. Cool. I didn't find it when I needed it and I'm pretty comfortable in the ecosystem. This is a problem.

Much like a PHP dev doubling down and arguing about whether PHP is well-designed which is the wrong path to win the argument about the power and utility of the language. Or a Node.JS enthusiast that argues that the tooling and packaging are not in fact a constant source of searing pain, again not the strength of that ecosystem. An Elixir dev that argues that you can just write your own libraries for the bits you need is arguing for how to bandaid a weakness. I suggest to accept that we have that weakness. We have plenty of other strengths.

This is all about tribes and defensiveness usually. And Node folks get sick of hearing about leftpad and NPM troubles, PHP folks get sick of getting a 2012 insult-blog-rant thrown at them quarterly and Elixir folks would love if people recognized that the language is in very active use and not actually fictional.

Lower your shoulders. Breathe. Say that yeah, I get that concern, I understand that criticism and it has some merit. I still prefer the darned thing.

What do you prefer in spite of its warts? I have a Java dev that oftens responds to these (hi!) and he is well aware that Java has warts. I'd be curious to hear about your faves. You can reply to this email or poke me on the fedi @lawik@fosstodon.org, I enjoy hearing your thoughts.

Thanks for reading. I appreciate it.