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I think ultimately Phoenix and by extension LV just don't have the manpower.

LiveWire builds on Laravel which is a massively popular framework on a massively popular language, Laravel itself using components from Symfony that is basically the backend framework with the most contributors in the world.

But LiveView may hit 1.0 this year :)




> I think ultimately Phoenix and by extension LV just don't have the manpower.

For comparison's sake:

- [LivewWire] Caleb (creator of LiveWire) made 1,000+ commits and added 200k lines of code from Jan 2019 to Feb 2021

- [LiveView] Chris (creator of LV) made 700+ commits and added 80k lines of code from Oct 2018 to Feb 2021

- [LiveView] Jose (creator of Elixir) made 450+ commits and added 25k lines of code from Oct 2018 to Feb 2021

There's even more contributors to LV (207) overall than LiveWire (145) which is interesting because LiveWire is 3x more popular based on GitHub stars.

From that you could say that LiveView has more manpower than LiveWire since Caleb wrote all of that code himself in a shorter amount of time while 2 people are main contributors to LV.

Plus at the same time Caleb wrote a huge amount of practical documentation (focused on building features), created lots of screencasts where you build features you would expect to see in most apps (data tables, etc.) and started a podcast around LiveWire. And on top of all of that he created AlpineJS at the same time.

> LiveWire builds on Laravel which is a massively popular framework on a massively popular language, Laravel itself using components from Symfony that is basically the backend framework with the most contributors in the world.

At a fundamental level it feels like the creator of LiveWire is investing in creating a tool that helps developers build applications better and faster. I think that stems from Laravel giving off a sense of developer productivity for building apps, but don't forget that library creators are making these decisions.

I never really got that same impression from working with Phoenix or LiveView. I think it caters towards a completely different type of developer than myself which is why I struggle so much using it. It always felt like instead of showing you how to do something, it makes you figure it out yourself.

> But LiveView may hit 1.0 this year :)

That would be nice to see but I'm not sure how much of a difference that will make in the short term. In the short term going 1.0 is really just deciding to tag a commit. If Chris and Jose plan to write another book to use LV that could still be over a year or 2 out unless they've been writing it in private, or if they re-write the documentation that's also another long journey.

Neither of them really strike me as the screencast type either. When they do create videos they do an excellent job at explaining things tho. Really wish they did more of them to be honest. But yeah, these things take time. I don't know what their schedules are like too so maybe it's not even fair to compare LV vs LiveWire in terms of how fast the library is being built. Maybe Chris and Jose only work on Phoenix and LV for 2-3 hours a week where as Caleb is working on his stuff full time.


This is an incredibly offensive and insulting comment about people you don’t know, regarding software you openly state you don’t use on a daily basis.

I would care a lot less if we were talking about billionaires building commercial startups, but you’re literally attacking open source contributors. Moreover, my personal experience in using LiveView and interacting with the community has been the exact opposite of yours, so I find your comments to be totally misleading for people who might think that your walls of text have any nuggets of wisdom in them.

I’ve tried a lot of open source software that left me thinking, “wow, what a waste of my time.” For some reason I never felt a need to openly attack the authors of these low-commercial-value-for-the-creator, volunteer-driven projects. You might want to consider directing your critical eye toward the actual problems in this world, rather than volunteer programmers’ projects that didn’t met your personal, highly-opinionated requirements.

The parent comment is Exhibit A for why so many people refuse to get actively involved in the open source software scene, and why so many drop out.


> Regarding software you openly state you don’t use on a daily basis

Perhaps I was too critical in some of the replies and should have phrased things in a more positive way but I did use Elixir / Phoenix / LV on a daily basis for a pretty long time.

Over the course of those 18 months I'd estimate putting in 250-300 hours of programming time in spurts while writing 3 applications totaling around 9,500 lines of assorted Phoenix / LV code. Not a lot of code by any means, but enough to put a decent dent towards developing the main app I was building which is where I encountered those issues at the time. I have no agenda or reason to make anything up. I want to see Elixir and Phoenix succeed in the end. I just decided to temporarily put it on hold until it gets over the early adopter phase.


Comparing two projects by the number of commits and lines of code written. You must be a manager.

Maybe Chris and Jose are more efficient? Maybe the Elixir/LiveView code is just better written and doesn't need rewrites?

Why do so many people glorify quantity over quality?


> Comparing two projects by the number of commits and lines of code written. You must be a manager.

We are dealing with limited information here, and GitHub makes it easy to see at a glance what folks are doing on a project. It just so happens it focuses on presenting commits and lines of code written.

Everyone knows it's not the best metric but to get a high level overview of activity those stats work. Especially when the person I was replying to said LV is maybe moving slow due to a lack of manpower. Those numbers show the opposite (LV has more folks working on the project than LiveWire, despite it being much less popular due to Elixir being a smaller niche than PHP).

> Maybe the Elixir/LiveView code is just better written and doesn't need rewrites?

I don't think it's fair to jump to any conclusions about the quality of either code bases.


Exactly, and without equalising between languages. PHP is verbose, elixir is elegant.


Maybe my impression following the Phoenix and LiveView commits was wrong but it still feels it's mainly two people.

José works at the same time on Elixir, Phoenix, LiveView, Ecto, Nx, Dashboard and more, it's a lot.

To be fair there also has been integration of LV in the Phoenix mix tasks, in addition to the Dashboard (using LV, ah!), so it's not like things are stalling.




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