[pdimitar]

Yes I don't want to work for a startup and I stated as much didn't I? ;)

What it has to do with Elixir is that Elixir does not scale well with a number of programmers, and many startups go through periods of explosive growth of personnel. With Elixir that very rarely works well, 99% of the time IMO it does not. Adding more people does not increase productivity, it hurts it even.

[pythonaut_16]

Do you think that’s inherent to the language, or a result of common patterns?

How do other languages, like Python, scale better to more devs, besides more devs available? All that comes to mind immediately is modules in Elixir being globally available, but I’m genuinely curios about your experiences.

[pdimitar]

It's mostly related to the fact that Elixir code is very terse and easy to understand, and that if you put 100 devs on a singular Phoenix web/API project codebase they will be stepping on each others' toes all the time so they need to kind of take turns if they don't want the codebase to become a complete mess.

Thirdly, Elixir devs are on average quite senior in general (as they are usually refugees from other stacks) which lends itself to one-man armies very well in my almost 8 years of experience working with Elixir.

[sb8244]

This doesn't track with my experience.

We scaled an org with both Ruby and Elixir (later, 1 of the 2 blessed languages) and there was no tangible difference in that way.

You could also scale in other ways like microservice. Elixir plays great in that world, as pretty much every language does.

Regarding one man armies. Usual way I've seen to scale is to find those one man armies and put less expensive Jr + mid engineers on their team and have them work together. I don't think that's an Elixir thing though.

I'm not trying to sell Elixir here. I think it has benefits in smaller org size that mellow out and equalize as a company grows. Also, startups should always work in whatever language is most comfortable to founding team.

[pdimitar]

Hard to argue against anecdotal evidence one way or the other -- my view is probably skewed because I usually avoid big companies.

RE: microservices, yep, that's one of the ways to scale Elixir teams to more people indeed.

RE: one-man armies, agreed.

> I'm not trying to sell Elixir here. I think it has benefits in smaller org size that mellow out and equalize as a company grows.

No worries, I am sold for 8 years now. ;)

And yes, the benefits kind of plateau from one dev count and up I found. That was kind of the core of my comment, too.

> Also, startups should always work in whatever language is most comfortable to founding team.

Oh, absolutely. I love Elixir a lot but won't shill for it if I find myself in a situation where it would be a bad choice. Plus in startups development speed is probably the biggest asset of the programmers so I am not judging. (Though I don't want to work for startups anymore.)

[weatherlight]

Is it any different than Ruby in this manner? I've worked at companies with 60 ruby engineers we do fine. It's called writing tests.

Does stepping on each other's toes happen, of course! but no worse than typescript, java, etc.

I don't buy this argument.

[pdimitar]

It's 50/50 and really depends on the people, this is just my 8-year old experience, I don't make it as an argument that's truthful beyond any doubt.

There is also the fact that the companies I chose to work with didn't want a lot of Elixir devs and we truly made miracles happen with teams of 2 to 8 people.