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I worked on an elixir project at a ruby shop for about a year. We had complex distributed system, and were replacing core ruby services with elixir. Ultimately
by lbhdc 5y ago
I worked on an elixir project at a ruby shop for about a year. We had complex distributed system, and were replacing core ruby services with elixir. Ultimately the project was a failure, and was re-re-written in Ruby, and the Elixir devs were let go.
We faced similar issues to you, bad tooling, weak libraries, and very few knowledgeable devs.
Finding people to hack on elixir was extremely difficult, and likely the driving force that killed the project. Having an inexperienced team who had no experience with many of the language features elixir offered created a very difficult to work in code base.
This killed productivity, so management threw resources at it. Code quality dropped further when we were no longer just a group of noobs interesting in hacking on elixir, and became a group of noobs begrudgingly hacking on elixir.
I feel pretty scared from the experience, and wouldn't be interested in using elixir professionally again. Which is a shame, it can be a nice language to write, and some of its tooling like hex is quite nice.
- joelbluminator 5y agoI think new languages wont be able to break in the top 10 without a mega corp pushing them. The market is too saturated and there is a language for everything under the sun. Elixir is just facing too much competition for web stuff and doesnt enjoy Google pushing it.
- pmarreck 5y agoI don't think it's necessary for a language to be in the top 10 to be considered a success. If the people who use it, wouldn't use anything else, then that is the success.
- joelbluminator 5y agoAs long as you're aware that hiring and maintaining will be significantly harder then yes you're right. But that also means there's no reason to choose esoteric tech X for yet another CRUD app; you would pick Erlang/Elixir when it actually makes sense and only then.
- abledon 5y agothank you for sharing, I am removing elixir from my resume after reading all these comments haha
- SZJX 5y agolol not sure if you're serious or not, as Elixir job offers are certainly still on the rise.