The interface to almost everything either contains or is based on a macro. This persists even in cases where you can clearly see there needed to be no macros at all.
The non-standard (won't work with anything else) and basically superfluous websocket protocol has bad fundamentals and has been marred by bad JavaScript code being needed for it. On top of that it's pretty bloated.
The actual channel processes could've simply followed a standard Erlang interface but someone (...) felt they needed to put their fingerprint on it, I guess, so it kind of doesn't. And yes, again everything surrounding channels is a bunch of macros until you at least get to write and use normal functions in the actual channel module.
They've had a long history of arbitrarily deciding to hide settings/configuration from dependencies they use and having no actual argument for doing so when asked to expose them.
If the part about macros being overused wasn't bad enough Phoenix also promotes this type of thinking by overusing them even in generated code, so people can follow the bad example.
> The interface to almost everything either contains or is based on a macro.
This is not true. The endpoint and router are macro based, but once it is routed, it is all functions. Your controller actions are functions, calling the view/template is a function, your channel is functions, the model/context layer are functions.
When it comes to behaviors, we do our best to follow Erlang/OTP conventions, but deviate where it makes sense. For example, channel has “join” instead of “init” because you can refuse a join but you can’t refuse an init. They have different return types and augmenting init could be confusing if later you were to write a plain GenServer.
It is easy to look from outside and say “someone wanted to put their fingerprints on it” but actual discussions were had in pretty much all of these topics. I suggest asking around. If you asked for something and we had no actual arguments, then please point me to such occurrences. I will be eager to clarify (and as a rule we generally do).
Can you elaborate on this? Why do you think this?