6 ms·

I wonder how the popularity trend of Elixir has been lately. I know you can try to see it through GitHub or Google Trends, but as many members of the Elixir com

by raphy 9y ago

I wonder how the popularity trend of Elixir has been lately. I know you can try to see it through GitHub or Google Trends, but as many members of the Elixir community use Slack I don't know if it's the best way to do it. One thing I'd like to see would be the evolution of downloads of the language and on Hex.

sotojuan 9y ago
It's got HN hype and a lot of the negatives that come with that (awful learning materials by people who haven't used it in production) and a decent amount of real world use though nothing major for now.
- lukeasrodgers 9y ago
  I believe Discord uses Elixir, and I think that counts as "major."
  - raphy 9y ago
    It is also used by Pinterest and Square Enix, as they both open sourced some of the tools they use.
  - oomem 9y ago
    Yes, and they wrote some interesting blog posts about it: https://blog.discordapp.com/scaling-elixir-f9b8e1e7c29b https://blog.discordapp.com/scaling-elixir-f9b8e1e7c29b https://blog.discordapp.com/how-discord-handles-push-request-bursts-of-over-a-million-per-minute-with-elixirs-genstage-8f899f0221b4 https://blog.discordapp.com/how-discord-handles-push-request...
  - brightball 9y ago
    Love Discord
- pmarreck 9y ago
  Also, Bleacher Report is a pretty large site on it: http://www.techworld.com/apps-wearables/how-elixir-helped-bleacher-report-handle-8x-more-traffic-3653957/ http://www.techworld.com/apps-wearables/how-elixir-helped-bl... They went from 150 Rails servers to 5 BEAM servers "and could probably get away with two" (!)
  - mmgutz 9y ago
    This seems to be the dominant use case for Elixir; migrate legacy Rails code to Elixir. When deciding between Go and Elixir for our startup I looked at both ecosystems. Go was significantly ahead in all categories: traction, articles on the web, packages on git, git activity, editor support ... I don't regret choosing Go but I always keep an eye out on Elixir. Pattern matching, pipe operator, immutability, supervisors ... I can only dream about that in Go.
    - pmarreck 9y ago
      I LOVE the pattern-matching/deconstruction/guards stuff. It eliminates SO much boilerplate logic. Just the function head of an Elixir function eliminates a dozen input validation and assignment lines in most other languages. It wouldn't be nearly as spectacular if it didn't pervade the entire language, though (for example, I'm sure you could get partway there in many other languages using a DSL) Same thing with immutability. If it doesn't pervade the entire language, it feels slapped-on, and you basically lose most (all?) of the guarantees (like removing an entire class of bugs caused by mutability). I saw what you saw in Go, but in doing my homework, I also saw an astonishing amount of ugliness[1][2][3], and additionally I took a bit of actual offense to the core philosophy of Go's design as stated by Rob Pike himself[4][5] so I am betting on (hoping for?) spectacular Elixir adoption I guess lol, as my current and all future projects for the foreseeable future will be in Elixir. About the only wart I've seen so far in Elixir is the pin operator[6], but that was necessary to preserve the name-rebinding ability in a pattern-matching context, and it stops seeming like a wart fairly quickly, once you realize why it's necessary. [1] https://anvaka.github.io/common-words/#?lang=go https://anvaka.github.io/common-words/#?lang=go makes it seem like 50% of the day-to-day code in the language is error-checking due to the lack of exceptions [2] https://github.com/ksimka/go-is-not-good https://github.com/ksimka/go-is-not-good [3] http://byrd.im/go-is-poor/ http://byrd.im/go-is-poor/ [4] http://nomad.so/2015/03/why-gos-design-is-a-disservice-to-intelligent-programmers/ http://nomad.so/2015/03/why-gos-design-is-a-disservice-to-in... [5] I'm actually a fan of Plan9 and appreciate Rob Pike's work on that [6] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27971357/what-is-the-pin-operator-for-and-are-elixir-variables-mutable#27975233 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27971357/what-is-the-pin...
- sb8244 9y ago
  Isn't that just a timing issue? Why chalk it up to HN immediately when it's more likely to be the general interest in the language increasing and more people using it for less time are writing about it? This is a good thing as these people will probably lead the future for its use.
  - sotojuan 9y ago
    It's just the name I give to languages or tools that get big online and generate a lot blog posts and shoddy learning material. Though most of the time it does start with HN. BTW I love Elixir and I'm happy to see it grow. Nothing bad about HN hype it just has its positives and negatives.
- qaq 9y ago
  bet365 is major.
pmarreck 9y ago
Indeed.com trends[1] show Elixir interest (though not yet jobs) surpassing both Haskell and Clojure right about now, which I found surprising especially given how much newer it is [1] https://www.indeed.com/jobtrends/q-Erlang-q-Elixir-q-Haskell-q-Clojure.html https://www.indeed.com/jobtrends/q-Erlang-q-Elixir-q-Haskell... (scroll down to 2nd chart)
- myth_drannon 9y ago
  on StackOveflow there are more Elixir jobs than Erlang but not Clojure http://www.reallyhyped.com/?keywords=elixir%2Cerlang%2Cclojure%2Chaskell http://www.reallyhyped.com/?keywords=elixir%2Cerlang%2Ccloju...
digitalzombie 9y ago
Gotta get more people to make noises really. It tough now since the web space is very competitive. Before that it's just PHP (well it displaced Perl) and then RoR pop out to give it a real competition. For a while you'd think Ruby was going to over take PHP for web dev but it eventually converge to a steady state the growth rate isn't increasing at all. If you look at tiobe index and red monk's for language popularity Ruby have either stayed teh same and move down a few spot. Javascript just sky rocketed after nodejs (this is relative I remember the first year or so where it was slow in term of growth, hype, and adoption). There are so many web dev pie out there for each language to take a chunk. After RoR was nodejs, this is on top of the other smaller player groovy, python django, java stuff, etc.. a least major players within the startups that I've experiences. I believe Elixir and Erlang is a very great language for web dev. Unfortunately it comes into a time where the market is very competitive with many alternative out there staking a claim for this field. At this point the web industry is really really hype imo. And people eat this up like candy. I can say for sure Elixir is a better concurrency model and better language than NodeJS will ever be for web development. And the hype if there is any is real for Elixir.
- FanaHOVA 9y ago
  > For a while you'd think Ruby was going to over take PHP for web dev but it eventually converge to a steady state the growth rate isn't increasing at all. Rails downloads almost doubled from 2015 to 2016 (15M -> 24M). Not sure where you see that the "growth rate isn't increasing at all". Source: RubyGems db data dump (more stats here: https://infinum.co/the-capsized-eight/analyzing-rubygems-stats-v2016 https://infinum.co/the-capsized-eight/analyzing-rubygems-sta...)
  - alexcastano 9y ago
    I've always thought that this is a consequence of tools like Docker, where each new image installs the gems from the beginning; but I could not prove my theory.
akeating 9y ago
Some Hex download details https://elixirforum.com/t/the-buzz-and-activity-around-elixir-continues-to-go-from-strength-to-strength/6139/5?u=adamk https://elixirforum.com/t/the-buzz-and-activity-around-elixi...
rhapsodyv 9y ago
I think is not that popular yet. Look at this issue for the sublime elixir plugin [1], it's breaks a lot of things and seems stalled for a long time... [1] https://github.com/vishnevskiy/ElixirSublime/issues/8 https://github.com/vishnevskiy/ElixirSublime/issues/8
- weatherlight 9y ago
  I don't know of many Elixir devs who use sublime for their development. IntelliJ, Vim, Emacs, Atom etc..

by raphy 9y ago

sotojuan 9y ago

It's got HN hype and a lot of the negatives that come with that (awful learning materials by people who haven't used it in production) and a decent amount of real world use though nothing major for now.

lukeasrodgers 9y ago
I believe Discord uses Elixir, and I think that counts as "major."
- raphy 9y ago
  It is also used by Pinterest and Square Enix, as they both open sourced some of the tools they use.
- oomem 9y ago
  Yes, and they wrote some interesting blog posts about it: https://blog.discordapp.com/scaling-elixir-f9b8e1e7c29b https://blog.discordapp.com/scaling-elixir-f9b8e1e7c29b https://blog.discordapp.com/how-discord-handles-push-request-bursts-of-over-a-million-per-minute-with-elixirs-genstage-8f899f0221b4 https://blog.discordapp.com/how-discord-handles-push-request...
- brightball 9y ago
  Love Discord
pmarreck 9y ago
Also, Bleacher Report is a pretty large site on it: http://www.techworld.com/apps-wearables/how-elixir-helped-bleacher-report-handle-8x-more-traffic-3653957/ http://www.techworld.com/apps-wearables/how-elixir-helped-bl... They went from 150 Rails servers to 5 BEAM servers "and could probably get away with two" (!)
- mmgutz 9y ago
  This seems to be the dominant use case for Elixir; migrate legacy Rails code to Elixir. When deciding between Go and Elixir for our startup I looked at both ecosystems. Go was significantly ahead in all categories: traction, articles on the web, packages on git, git activity, editor support ... I don't regret choosing Go but I always keep an eye out on Elixir. Pattern matching, pipe operator, immutability, supervisors ... I can only dream about that in Go.
  - pmarreck 9y ago
    I LOVE the pattern-matching/deconstruction/guards stuff. It eliminates SO much boilerplate logic. Just the function head of an Elixir function eliminates a dozen input validation and assignment lines in most other languages. It wouldn't be nearly as spectacular if it didn't pervade the entire language, though (for example, I'm sure you could get partway there in many other languages using a DSL) Same thing with immutability. If it doesn't pervade the entire language, it feels slapped-on, and you basically lose most (all?) of the guarantees (like removing an entire class of bugs caused by mutability). I saw what you saw in Go, but in doing my homework, I also saw an astonishing amount of ugliness[1][2][3], and additionally I took a bit of actual offense to the core philosophy of Go's design as stated by Rob Pike himself[4][5] so I am betting on (hoping for?) spectacular Elixir adoption I guess lol, as my current and all future projects for the foreseeable future will be in Elixir. About the only wart I've seen so far in Elixir is the pin operator[6], but that was necessary to preserve the name-rebinding ability in a pattern-matching context, and it stops seeming like a wart fairly quickly, once you realize why it's necessary. [1] https://anvaka.github.io/common-words/#?lang=go https://anvaka.github.io/common-words/#?lang=go makes it seem like 50% of the day-to-day code in the language is error-checking due to the lack of exceptions [2] https://github.com/ksimka/go-is-not-good https://github.com/ksimka/go-is-not-good [3] http://byrd.im/go-is-poor/ http://byrd.im/go-is-poor/ [4] http://nomad.so/2015/03/why-gos-design-is-a-disservice-to-intelligent-programmers/ http://nomad.so/2015/03/why-gos-design-is-a-disservice-to-in... [5] I'm actually a fan of Plan9 and appreciate Rob Pike's work on that [6] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27971357/what-is-the-pin-operator-for-and-are-elixir-variables-mutable#27975233 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27971357/what-is-the-pin...
sb8244 9y ago
Isn't that just a timing issue? Why chalk it up to HN immediately when it's more likely to be the general interest in the language increasing and more people using it for less time are writing about it? This is a good thing as these people will probably lead the future for its use.
- sotojuan 9y ago
  It's just the name I give to languages or tools that get big online and generate a lot blog posts and shoddy learning material. Though most of the time it does start with HN. BTW I love Elixir and I'm happy to see it grow. Nothing bad about HN hype it just has its positives and negatives.
qaq 9y ago
bet365 is major.

pmarreck 9y ago

Indeed.com trends[1] show Elixir interest (though not yet jobs) surpassing both Haskell and Clojure right about now, which I found surprising especially given how much newer it is [1] https://www.indeed.com/jobtrends/q-Erlang-q-Elixir-q-Haskell-q-Clojure.html https://www.indeed.com/jobtrends/q-Erlang-q-Elixir-q-Haskell... (scroll down to 2nd chart)

myth_drannon 9y ago
on StackOveflow there are more Elixir jobs than Erlang but not Clojure http://www.reallyhyped.com/?keywords=elixir%2Cerlang%2Cclojure%2Chaskell http://www.reallyhyped.com/?keywords=elixir%2Cerlang%2Ccloju...

digitalzombie 9y ago

Gotta get more people to make noises really. It tough now since the web space is very competitive. Before that it's just PHP (well it displaced Perl) and then RoR pop out to give it a real competition. For a while you'd think Ruby was going to over take PHP for web dev but it eventually converge to a steady state the growth rate isn't increasing at all. If you look at tiobe index and red monk's for language popularity Ruby have either stayed teh same and move down a few spot. Javascript just sky rocketed after nodejs (this is relative I remember the first year or so where it was slow in term of growth, hype, and adoption). There are so many web dev pie out there for each language to take a chunk. After RoR was nodejs, this is on top of the other smaller player groovy, python django, java stuff, etc.. a least major players within the startups that I've experiences. I believe Elixir and Erlang is a very great language for web dev. Unfortunately it comes into a time where the market is very competitive with many alternative out there staking a claim for this field. At this point the web industry is really really hype imo. And people eat this up like candy. I can say for sure Elixir is a better concurrency model and better language than NodeJS will ever be for web development. And the hype if there is any is real for Elixir.

FanaHOVA 9y ago
> For a while you'd think Ruby was going to over take PHP for web dev but it eventually converge to a steady state the growth rate isn't increasing at all. Rails downloads almost doubled from 2015 to 2016 (15M -> 24M). Not sure where you see that the "growth rate isn't increasing at all". Source: RubyGems db data dump (more stats here: https://infinum.co/the-capsized-eight/analyzing-rubygems-stats-v2016 https://infinum.co/the-capsized-eight/analyzing-rubygems-sta...)
- alexcastano 9y ago
  I've always thought that this is a consequence of tools like Docker, where each new image installs the gems from the beginning; but I could not prove my theory.

akeating 9y ago

Some Hex download details https://elixirforum.com/t/the-buzz-and-activity-around-elixir-continues-to-go-from-strength-to-strength/6139/5?u=adamk https://elixirforum.com/t/the-buzz-and-activity-around-elixi...

rhapsodyv 9y ago

I think is not that popular yet. Look at this issue for the sublime elixir plugin [1], it's breaks a lot of things and seems stalled for a long time... [1] https://github.com/vishnevskiy/ElixirSublime/issues/8 https://github.com/vishnevskiy/ElixirSublime/issues/8

weatherlight 9y ago
I don't know of many Elixir devs who use sublime for their development. IntelliJ, Vim, Emacs, Atom etc..