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by joelbluminator 2222 days ago
> If Phoenix wants to increase their adoption, then I think they need to accept that things like this matter.

It's gonna be tough for them really, even if it's a great framework (I have no idea). Elixir didn't take off like Golang or other languages from the last decade. It seems to have quite the learning curve, so for beginners any of ruby / php or even .net / java will make much more sense. For seniors...idk. Not everyone like functional programming. I do hear praise for the language I can't deny it and what seems like a tiny but vibrant community, but the numbers are just not there. I hope Elixir can maintain it's niche and not outright die just because I know some people rely on it for their pay check but honestly I'm not sure if we'll still have these discussions 5 years from now.

1 comments

Popular tech pays the bills of many people.

Fringe tech is usually a secret weapon in consulting, or, more rarely (but still happening quite a bit), in a full-time job.

Apples to oranges.

Erlang existed for 30 years and has been used by its small-ish but also very vibrant community, with great success.

So you know, very popular or not, us the people who use it successfully commercially will keep doing so.

But as I have said in the past, if Rust (or OCaml, or any statically strongly typed language that compiles to native code) gains all the guarantees of the BEAM VM then I'll abandon Elixir the next day.

The people who flocked to Elixir thought it was gonna be the new Node / Rails. They're now finding out it's definitely not gonna be either of those things. It remains to be seen if they love it enough to stick around, or will we see a silent churn to the new hotness or even back to Ruby.
Another gross generalization.