Only half a data point: I played around with it for a private project. It works but the documentation is far from good enough for production. I was even considering getting the book, but it's not out yet. In my humble opinion, normal documentation should be enough to understand a framework, otherwise you can't expect anyone beyond hobbyist and enthusiast to pick it up. "Break out" is definitively part of the design goals, so I always felt like they put a hatch.

It's not really producing a whole separate language that I've found. There is a lot of functionality so the learning curve has been pretty steep to start. The macros are for pretty specific things but once you split out stuff like permissions, changes, etc you just use normal elixir modules. I can't think of any situation where I'd need to go outside of it and couldn't. It is built on top of all my normal elixir stuff and I've had no issue using them as normally. I'd definitely suggest reading the book first though there is a lot of unknown unknowns with it.

We've always had trouble with this. The closest thing to Ash I've seen elsewhere is an ORM. It's not an ORM though.

Ash is a declarative application framework. You define your application logic using Ash.Resource, which model things like state, but most importantly actions.

Another analogy is that it's similar to GraphQL, but lowered down to the backend layer. It's a declarative, typed application description and implementation framework, that you can derive a GraphQL from (amongst many other things).

Another way to think of it is a whole ecosystem of packages that standardize the vast majority of things you want to do when building an Elixir backend, instead of trying to kludge together a bunch of different tools. Pagination, sorting, filtering, authentication, authorization, all builtin and designed to work together.

I've talked about this a few times and this is the shortest answer to this question. The first part of this talk may help explain concisely where Ash fits at a higher level.

https://youtu.be/10VBTcN8gAo?feature=shared&t=133

Ash Framework was created to solve a fundamental problem in (web) application development for business apps. When you build a new app, you want to focus on the valuable, innovative parts - what's visible above the waterline of the iceberg. However, modern web applications require an enormous amount of "below the waterline" functionality that's essential but not where you want to spend your time.

Running a consultancy and building various client projects highlights this challenge. Everyone wants to focus on the core, valuable features, but must also deal with relatively boring, commodity problems that have been solved countless times before. This often means reinventing the wheel, which clients understandably see as low-value work.

Authentication is a perfect example - most customers don't even specify login functionality as a feature. Similarly, admin interfaces are considered table stakes for modern applications. The list is extensive: admin UIs, observability, security, and more. All important, but time spent there can feel wasteful when you'd rather be innovating.

Ash's primary goal is to keep you focused on the innovative work above the waterline while minimizing time spent below it. The framework accomplishes this by modelling your domain and deriving everything else.

Do these help at all?

https://hexdocs.pm/ash/what-is-ash.html

https://youtu.be/vjnPjrCF4rs?si=sGlfZeEpPrfp1J0K

I started using it because I just found it a much nicer way to define my data, auth and interactions with it compared to contexts. It also makes it easier to reuse it and because of the way the data is modeled you get a lot of nice things like the ashphoenix forms which make dealing with them a lot nicer in my opinion.

I'm also likely to be hiring soon so having a well defined way to well..define things seems like it will make it easier with onboarding but I haven't tested this yet.

(Been using elixir for about a decade)

If you've tried to make a JSON API with Phoenix, it can be pretty cumbersome to generate an OpenAPI spec for the project. It's a very manual and tedious process, even when working with OpenApiSpex (the go-to Elixir library for generating an OpenAPI specs). And if your code implementation changes, then you often have to update your spec to match it.

With Ash, the same data used to model your application is also used to derive the data needed to build the OpenAPI spec. So there's a real value proposition there IMO. It eliminates much of the problems of keeping your spec in line with your code, since they are both modeled in a single location.

Disclaimer: I only learned this by working through the book, so I haven't actually gotten to experience anything off the happy path.