[bluesnowmonkey]

Here's one anecdote: I use Elixir professionally, for 8 years now. A few years ago I moved to the suburbs and met a neighbor two houses down who happens to run a software company based on Elixir with about 20 devs. Seems like I wouldn't be running into Elixir people in my daily, non-professional life unless there were a lot of them.

I have a theory about why there's more getting done with Elixir than you perceive. It's very productive, and you can get a lot done alone or with a very small team. You don't need as much devops. You maybe don't need as many frontend devs, because LiveView. And so on. Elixir teams don't need to hire as much, so when you look around, you don't see a ton of Elixir job postings. Fewer jobs discourages people from leaning into it as a career choice, which means fewer devs, strangling the overall growth of the community.

Also, at least in large tech companies, small productive teams are anathema to managers. Headcount is everything, and you have much more political power managing 10 Java devs than 3 Elixir devs. Never mind that the company is spending more on salaries, because that's the company's money, not yours. Anything you can do to have a bigger team is a win.