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dkuku.bsky.social
@dkuku.bsky.social

Every time I try to start with ash, I get stuck. I tried with tdd which is very easy in phoenix or rails because the error often guides you what to do next. With ash it's not that obvious.

Zach Daniel
@zachdaniel.dev

You should share where you get stuck :) We have a lot of people in the community willing to help, all you have to do is ask. Let us know where you got stuck in a GitHub issue or on ElixirForum/discord 🙇‍♂️

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dkuku.bsky.social
@dkuku.bsky.social

I appreciate the community's help, but when I get stuck on basic concepts, I know I'll struggle even more with advanced topics. One major blocker was the lack of test examples. While there is a page in the documentation about testing, it doesn't cover important areas like relationships.

dkuku.bsky.social
@dkuku.bsky.social

My usual approach is to start with a test and let the compiler errors guide me. However, in this case, the errors were so cryptic that I had to abandon the effort. The ash_hq and realworld examples have very few tests, which doesn't help.

Zach Daniel
@zachdaniel.dev

To be clear, we don't "blame" folks that have trouble getting started with Ash in any way. Ash's understandability, usability, DX etc. is entirely on me 😁. We have to improve all of the areas you mentioned. I only aim to explain why it's a bit more complex than something like contexts.

Zach Daniel
@zachdaniel.dev

Agreed, I'd like to add a test generator. The phoenix generators make a lot of assumptions and ultimately set you up with something far less powerful/flexible than an Ash.Resource. Application logic being a bag of functions is something that IMO helps when you start but that you pay 👇🏻

Zach Daniel
@zachdaniel.dev

Please report any cryptic errors as bugs :) We can't fix them if we don't know about them, and often what makes sense to someone w/ experience is cryptic to someone without.