[pdimitar]

Wait until you find out about Elixir and its web framework Phoenix. $10 hosting, 2000+ reqs/s with 100% parallelism.

Before you say it, it's quite popular and used already. But there's a barrier beyond which a lot of programmers just don't tread, and will stay in Python / PHP / JS regardless (while raving about how awesome Elixir is).

My guess is market size and job security concerns but who knows, maybe some of what you say applies as well.

[ncmncm]

This is more apt than you know.

If Rust finds only the amount of penetration that Erlang has, it will have failed.

[pdimitar]

I guess this will always be a contention point since the definition of "failed" is very flexible.

I'm well aware that Erlang/Elixir are still niche, and Rust is kind of niche as well. But by what measure? Usually it's a comparison with e.g. Python, Java, JS popularity and usage. In that regard 99% of the technologies out there have "failed".

I find such comparisons meaningless however. In the segments of the technologies I work with there are a lot of things happening, there are very good money to be made, and productivity is usually very high compared to the "successful" technologies.

So everybody is free to look skeptically at the "failed" technologies and "wisely" conclude that if they were THAT good they surely would have displaced the mainstream ones by now, right? Hence they can't be that good, m-hm, no sir.

I have no objection to people thinking that shallow. In the meantime, a lot of us make very good money and are not forever stuck on problems that have 20-year old StackOverflow threads. It feels really good.

[ncmncm]

Failed, or fizzled, means that when somebody working on a project leaves, you can't can't count on finding anybody to hire in to replace them. Allowing anything essential to be coded in the language, then, is an existential risk for a small company or division.

It means nobody wants you working on anything essential unless they have already bet the company on that thing.

[pdimitar]

I am well aware of that adage as well. But there's mounting [anecdotal from many directions] evidence that people get very easily onboarded in Elixir (sadly doesn't apply to Rust or Haskell or OCaml though).

So when trying to analyze this situation today, at the brink of 2022, it pays off to also add factors that haven't been there before e.g. newer tech that people can easily pick.

I am not trying to convince you to pick a new language btw, but I find your opinions to be just parroting some common wisdom that's fairly outdated at this point. Even if its basic premise still stands the devil is always in the details, and those details favour some of the more fringe tech a little bit more compared to some mere 5 years ago.

[ncmncm]

Mastering a tool that nobody else has, and that is radically better than what others are using, can be akin to a superpower. But Spider-Man and Doc Ock are not happier than other people. What they are, mostly, is alone.

So, a niche tool may be best for you if you like to work alone.