Fair. If you have this friction then it's not worth pursuing.

One thing that really helped me pick it up was saying YOLO and rewriting one part of the business stack from Ruby on Rails to Elixir. It taught me quickly and well.

The official guides are also great and IMO you can get through them all without a rush in two weekends. But again, if you don't want to then don't.

You can also try asking right here in this HN thread. Maybe I or others would be willing to give you a more detailed response.

> whether you understand the answers is a whole different story.

You can always ask follow up questions for clarification, people there are generally really friendly.

> Elixir gives you too much freedom on how to write something on a syntax level

This is true perhaps compared to python or go, but not compared to Java, JS/TS, or some others.

> socket "/ws/:user_id", MyApp.UserSocket, websocket: [path: "/project/:project_id"]

Socket is a behavior, which is like a trait or interface. MyAppWeb.UserSocket implements the behavior. It's basically a convenience over having to write a bunch of repetitive WS or long poll handling every time you want a socket like thing. Its pretty well documented https://phoenix.hexdocs.pm/Phoenix.Socket.html.

I love Elixir and Phoenix, but Phoenix especially uses a lot of compile-time macros and it can be a steep learning curve when you need to pull apart the skeleton framework to figure out how things are actually wired.

I pretty frequently find myself needing to open up the source to understand what's actually going on, the docs aren't bad but it often feels like they assume a lot of existing familiarity with phoenix.

In this example, `socket` is a compile time macro and it's being called with

    path = "/ws/:user_id"
    module = MyApp.UserSocket
    args = [
      websocket: [
        path: "/project/:project_id"
      ]
    ]

and what is does is register that data with the `phoenix_sockets` attribute inside the module you called `socket` from. At compile time that gets turned into a lookup inside your module, and presumable then the UserSocket module is invoked when a websocket request hits the specified path.

Would you find it more clear if socket was called like this?

    socket("/ws/:user_id", MyApp.UserSocket, [websocket: [path: "/project/:project_id"]])

Or, alternatively, would it help if the endpoint was more specifically defined like

    defmodule MyApp.Endpoint do
      use Phoenix.Endpoint, 
        otp_app: :my_app,
        web_sockets: [
          socket("/ws/:user_id", MyApp.UserSocket, [websocket: [path: "/project/:project_id"]])
        ]
    end

[delayed]

Here's what you need for Java:

Download SDKMan/Jenv

Install the version(s) of Java you need for your projects

Make sure your JAVA_HOME environment variable is set

Ensure your IDEs locate the correct Java home

Compared to all that, Elixir's two installers are trivial.

And if you have a competent package manager, you can just tell it to get Elixir and it'll handle Erlang for free.