I have been on again/off again with Elixir for the past ten years, and I can imagine that the upgrade path between Phoenix/LiveView versions would be a pain for orgs that adopted Elixir early. I am not sure how Rails handled breaking changes (as I was never a Rails dev), but I think the rate of change is somewhat problematic if one were to adopt Elixir (and Phoenix/LiveView) today. Hopefully, this will change over time. Edit: and especially with the release of LiveView 1.0.
Elixir has been backwards compatible since v1.0, released more than 7 years ago. Phoenix has also been API stable for a similar period of time and Ecto for 4+ years.
LiveView has changed over time but that’s precisely why it is on a 0.x release cycle. Even then, we do our best to deprecate first whenever possible. But the goal is that established projects have been stable.
In any case, LiveView is nearing 1.0 now, which makes us comfortable enough to promote it as part of the default Phoenix experience.
I think the bigger problem with Elixir is the smallness of its community. There were several libraries that I started using (for example, Gringotts) that were actively developed for a while but then died off and nobody picked up where things were left off. Unfortunately, I am not skilled enough to put forth contributions myself (aside from the occasional bug report). But once LiveView hits 1.0, I think that if the community continues to expand, Elixir has an even brighter future.
Thanks for all your hard work making it possible! :)
