[pmarreck]

> near me

You are experiencing the same global pandemic the rest of us are, right? Remote work and all that? (It’s honestly not for everyone. I prefer some physical facetime myself or I... “get disconnected”)

> not a strongly-typed language

While this guarantees elimination of a class of bug, pattern matching plus guards cover most of the potential bug surfaces there IMHO. I know the language creators have been considering some directions to go, there

[bot41]

That is a good point and I am working remotely in my current job until next year at least. I think my time and effort is best put into trying to get a job in the tech stack I know at the moment rather than trying to switch.

[joelbluminator]

Pandemic or no pandemic, most jobs are at least local to the country. If he is from Russia it's way harder for him to get a job in a U.S / EU company. Also - if it's hard for him to get an Elixir job now (and let's assume he knows if it's hard or not and heard of the concept of remote), while Elixir is past it's peak, is it a good bet to keep going the Elixir route?

[triplejjj]

> “Elixir is past it’s peak”

I would really appreciate any data that backs this up. Or is this a personal observation written as if it was a consensus? Because if we are going by personal experiences, the community definitely feels bigger and more active than before to me.

[joelbluminator]

https://insights.stackoverflow.com/trends?tags=elixir

Now you may say Stackoverflow isn't a good measurement. In Tiobe Elixir hasn't made it to the top 50 https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/

There is little reason for me to believe Elixir is before it's peak, the data is showing otherwise. Elixir's contemporaries (Rust / Go / Kotlin) are at a totally different place usage wise. So I tend to think this is it for Elixir, it's all down hill from here. If you have data showing otherwise please let me know.

[triplejjj]

That’s very little data to make such broad claims.

Up until 2017 or so, you could see the Elixir community active on StackOverflow with answers from José, Chris and most maintainers. Then the community collectively moved to Elixir Forum. Wouldn’t you prefer to ask questions where the maintainers can also answer? Per the Elixir Forum stats, the number of active users keep growing.

I won’t comment on TIOBE because you can find plenty of critique elsewhere. For example, in the Redmonk rank, Elixir does fairly well on the GitHub axis, and is ahead of contemporaries like Clojure and Julia, and ahead of other functional languages like Haskell, Ocaml, Erlang, and even F#.

I strongly believe Elixir is before its peak. Elixir is most likely still growing, just not at the same pace as languages like Rust or Kotlin.

[joelbluminator]

> and is ahead of contemporaries like Clojure and Julia, and ahead of other functional languages like Haskell, Ocaml,

That's kinda my point. These are the languages you should compare Elixir to, the esoteric ones. Not to PHP, not to Node or not even Ruby. I doubt this is going to change much.

What I said about Elixir (lack of jobs) is also true for the languages you listed.

[joelbluminator]

OK found something to help us quantify this debate https://towardsdatascience.com/these-are-the-real-stack-over...

Now this is interesting because this counts question page views, not questions asked.

You can choose Elixir in that embedded tool, it's too bad its only for 2017-2018 but it still validates my point. My guess is the numbers for 2019-2020 are worse for Elixir.

[triplejjj]

I don't see how this is any better. Most traffic on SO comes from search engines and if the questions and answers are elsewhere, such as in the Elixir Forum, then search engines will lead devs away from SO.

You say the language is in decline and none of this is solid evidence that's the case. It just says Elixir devs are not really active in Stack Overflow, which anyone in the community would be able to quickly point out.

[colecut]

What exactly leads you to believe that Elixir is past its peak?

[pmarreck]

> Elixir is past it's peak

It's funny because not only is popularity not a good indicator of the quality/utility of a tool, if it is overpopular it can actually hurt things

[joelbluminator]

Also, looking at the numbers in the UK on Linkedin: 132 Elixir jobs for the entire UK (ruby has 1941, php has 4832, java 10973). I'm not saying it's impossible but 132 mentions is not a lot. And it's not as if no one is fighting you for these Elixir jobs, quite a few people still want these jobs. Is Elixir still being chosen for new projects by startups or is it all python / go / rust ? The numbers for Elixir are very low.

[derefr]

People who are hiring for roles using smaller languages know that there are few people local to them who are practitioners in the language. They tend to do one of two things about that:

1. They don't even bother advertising a position in local geographical "general" job boards. (Job postings on LinkedIn cost money for every day you have them up; they're a waste of resources if you can predict with high confidence that nobody will find the role through there.) Instead, they'll advertise globally but targeted to the language's community (i.e. language-specific job boards, forums and chat groups, newsletters, etc.) This is where the people using the language are looking, too, anyway, because they also know that there are too few local opportunities for it to make sense to invest the time in checking local job-boards for a job matching their skillset.

2. They don't bother hiring for the language. Instead, they hire for "experience with [relevant language paradigms]" and "experience with any of [similar, more-popular languages]" and then expect the new hire to learn the language on the job.

My personal job-criterion for hiring Elixir devs is "a polyglot in several different language paradigms, fluent in at least one functional language." I find that that filter actually predicts better whether they'll be a good Elixir dev, than actual experience using Elixir does.

-----

As an aside, there's also the fact that languages like Erlang/Elixir (or the MLs, or the Lisps, or Prolog, or...) tend not to be languages used for everything in a company, but instead tend to be languages used for the secret sauce core component of a company. A lot of the time, companies don't talk about using these languages, even though they do, because they consider them a competitive advantage over their rivals in whatever niche they occupy.

Heroku is an obvious example: much of their architecture was written in Erlang [nearly everything at first], but they never advertised that fact once in any official capacity. Likewise, HFT firms never mention they're using ML or Prolog, but many do, because trading bots are often just souped-up expert systems. The only time you find these things out, is when having a beer with ex-engineers from those companies.

[lostcolony]

I'll echo this - when I've worked in polyglot shops, specifically on a team that did a lot of Erlang, we hired for "exposure to functional paradigms", not Erlang. The only places that looked to hire the specific language (and even that was negotiable) were places that just had Java. And the average quality of applicants was universally worse.

[joelbluminator]

It's a common practice to at least say what stack you're working on on a job ad. If it's not a requirement I usually see "We use Rails but don't expect you to know it already".

[lostcolony]

The JD was, obviously, far more descriptive than the four words I listed there. I'm saying the actual, relevant requirement, not the description of the job.

[joelbluminator]

While you may be right, looking at job boards is the only objective measurement I can make. Maybe the jobs are hiding under different names, in different places. Who knows. To me, seeing there's little jobs and that there's a clear decline in Stackoverflow Trends, and that Elixir isn't even in the top 50 in Tiobe, this all means something. Hearing of people saying they can't get a job - means something. I'm sure if you're in one of the major tech cities in the U.S, you could probably land an Elixir job. You can also land a Haskell job. Or Ocaml or anything else under the sun. This means little for most people who don't live there.

[jake_morrison]

There is also a funny effect which is driving Python to be the most "popular" language. Someone will post a job advert for e.g. Java, and list Python as being one of the "nice to have" languages, either due to machine learning, devops, or just because it's nice to know a scripting language. Python is currently the nice to have language. So you see it on the list of hot languages, but in fact there are not all that many Python jobs, they are all actually e.g. Java jobs.

[lawik]

I see plenty of new startups in Elixir and haven't had any real issue finding Elixir client work since I switched to it. Elixir is not nearly as ubiquitous as Ruby was and I don't think it will be. I don't think that's necessary either. For people playing the numbers game I guess Java, Python and JS are the languages to pick.

[joelbluminator]

It's not as ubiquitous as Ruby is currently either, despite Ruby declining quite a lot you can't really compare the 2.

There are a lot of happy devs who can find Elixir work, it depends a lot on location, past experience etc. I do think the number of jobs advertised is fairly low compared to demand. SO on one hand it could lead to high salaries. On the other hand it could lead to not all people landing a job (which if you look at the comments some people here are complaining about).