Ruby vs Elixir- Upgraded Comparison For 2020
Tags: webdev, software, programming
Published: 2020-06-19 09:54:35

For many years, We all have been using the Ruby language for web development. It gets better with Ruby on Rails – a framework, which is a great framework to develop web apps. But the tech industry doesn’t stop here. New languages are invented, come to the industry and gain tremendous popularity.

But now, web developers are actively discussing Elixir- a new programming language and its popular Phoenix framework. You might be new with Elixir or confused to choose best between Ruby and Elixir. Hence here we came up with comparison- Ruby vs Elixir. Before dive to the comparison, let us see Ruby and Elixir in detail.

**Ruby-**
Ruby was created in the mid- 1990s by the Japanese computer scientist and programmer, Yukihiro Matsumoto, and the first version appeared in 1994. It was developed with a programmer’s comfort and happiness in mind. The aim was to make Ruby coding enjoyable and also productive.

Ruby is an interpreted and object-oriented programming language. It’s main purpose is to create simple and understandable web apps where fast development, clarity, and syntax simplicity are more important than running speed of an app.

**Elixir-**
Elixir is a functional programming language, which makes it different from objected-oriented Ruby. Apart from the fundamental difference, many ruby programmers are preferring Elixir as their next language, like its creator and maintainer. Elixir runs on Erlang Virtual Machine, which is a solution for applications that scale fast. 

The popular framework for Elixir is Phoenix, built by Chris McCord in 2014 and with the goal of outperforming Ruby on Rails.

**Ruby vs Elixir – A Comparison**
**Advantages Of Ruby-**
*1. Clean syntax-*
It is easy to write clean human-friendly code because of Ruby’s clean syntax. And hence it becomes easy for beginners to start through.

*2. Productivity-*
Ruby is an easy choice for startups where time and resources are limited. And this is because of its flexibility and availability of a lot of ready solutions to common solutions. According to experts, Ruby on Rails requires 30-40% less time to build applications as compared to the other technologies.

Ruby is an expressive language where just some lines of code can do the same job as chunks of code in other languages. There are many gems that solve almost all problems and this makes it easy to build an MVP. 

*3. Ruby on Rails-*
Ruby on Rails is a great framework with a developed ecosystem, where many problems have well-established, de-facto standard solutions to specific problems. It dominates among other frameworks for Ruby, which makes the coding style unified. Rails’ popularity has made Ruby as top programming languages.  

*4. Readability through flexibility-*
Because of the language’s powerful metaprogramming abilities, creating declarative domain-specific languages (DSL) feels as natural as it gets and is the reason of ruby gems have become loved by developers. A good ruby code hardly needs comments. 

**Disadvantages Of Ruby-**
*1. Tough to maintain-*
Ruby developers use many libraries and tools also to keep the code accurate and clean. But if you use it to the great extent, it can cause more issues. If you change something in the original implementation of library, it may cause problems to work as you want it to.

Know more at- [https://solaceinfotech.com/blog/ruby-vs-elixir-upgraded-comparison-for-2020/]