5 ms·

Are you happy with the way things are going for Elixir? It seemed to me like the Elixir community was hoping for it to become the next Ruby and I don't see that

Are you happy with the way things are going for Elixir? It seemed to me like the Elixir community was hoping for it to become the next Ruby and I don't see that happening anymore. It will have to settle for being a well respected but obscure piece of tech, kinda like what Erlang is.

jjdeveloper 5y ago
I see Elixir pulling in a lot of people in with Liveview, especially those in the node/react world who are getting tired of the churn and build complexities.
cpursley 5y ago
Elixir and Phoneix are more popular than ever, especially with the release of LiveView. The ecosystem and community continues to absorb refugees from Ruby and other stacks. It's such a better platform than Ruby and Rails that I won't bother writing about it here - there are already hundreds of blog posts about it. Productivity is at least on par with Ruby (I believe better) and performance on another plane of existence.
- joelbluminator 5y ago
  Sorry that really doesn't add up to what I see when I look at job boards, Elixir has really poor numbers. The Ruby guys who wanted to jump ship to Elixir already did so a few years ago (some of them will continue to jump ship from Elixir to Rust or Go because hey why not). So I don't know where new growth will come to Elixir. It's not just jobs, by any metric you can think of Elixir is an obscure tech, if you want I will add sources to this claim but hopefully we can agree.
  - cpursley 5y ago
    You may have heard of some of these companies: - https://appunite.com/blog/top-10-elixir-companies-to-follow https://appunite.com/blog/top-10-elixir-companies-to-follow - https://elixir-companies.com/en https://elixir-companies.com/en
    - joelbluminator 5y ago
      Pepsico, Toyota ...come on now that's weak. They're not even IT companies let alone Tech. Whatsapp is running on a fork of Erlang afaik , not Elixir. Look I'm not saying no one is using Elixir, I'm just saying there's little jobs that's all. Cherry picking some famous names isn't gonna change that.
      - oblio 5y ago
        Plus these companies tend to have tens of techs stacks and hundreds of projects, you never know if what they're highlighting isn't some small internal project used by just one team and developed by more or less a lone wolf developer, with the project on life support after said developer left the company.
        dnautics 5y ago
        Pepsico and Toyota are sponsors for elixir events on the regular.
        oblio 5y ago
        Nice!
      - regularfry 5y ago
        It's a difficult metric, that one. In part because I get the impression that high-specificity tech like Elixir and to a certain degree Clojure attract people who, once they're in the job, _never leave_, and their productivity is high enough (if you believe the marketing) that you just don't need to grow a team as hard and as fast as you would on a more "popular" stack to get equivalent outcomes. If all that's true, it's a natural consequence that better tools will have fewer job postings: you need fewer people to get the job done, and the ones you've got have really good retention. However, so will tools on the other side of the bell curve: nobody in their right mind wants to go there, either on the supply or demand side. So all popularity really tells you is where the enterprise hype machine was, five, ten, fifteen years ago such that "nobody got fired for choosing X" and "learn X! It's got a lot of job postings!" still align. But the enterprise hype machine is optimised for tools that have a very specific set of surface criteria: enormous libraries so you're not inventing anything, rock-solid vendor support so there are people being paid to evangelise it into orgs (or, like JS, are ubiquitous anyway, but I think that particular lightning only strikes once), and "easy to learn" ergonomics such that developers asymptote towards replaceable cogs in both quality and quantity. "Well respected but obscure" describes a certain sort of success, by that reasoning. It just needs enough of a community to stay alive, and that's a bit more of a toss-up. Ruby haemorrhaged people in the Rails 4-5-6 cycle as people jumped ship to node, but Rails 7 and Ruby 3 are looking extremely tasty despite that, and I wouldn't be surprised if we saw a bit of a resurgence in popularity over the next couple of years outside big enterprises. Most of the people I interview have got into tech after Rails 3 was released, and generally aren't aware of why the Rails/Phoenix/Django concept was such a breath of fresh air. I think what you'll see is that the reason Phoenix and Elixir have a "next big thing" isn't technical factors at all. It'll be a rediscovery by the new generation when someone unexpected goes unicorn and the story is "it was all down to Phoenix", even when the real factors were elsewhere.
  - UnknownUser1234 5y ago
    You’re right. Software development has devolved into a popularity game.
    - joelbluminator 5y ago
      I think people may be traumatised by what happened to Perl or Cobol. They don't want to become obsolete. In reality what happened to Perl isn't the norm imo.
      - handrous 5y ago
        PHP is the more recent one. Folks who worked in PHP but got out at the right time look at all the low-paying PHP jobs (and there are lots of them!) and see mostly-PHP-experience job candidates dismissed out of hand for higher-paying jobs that would offer work experience outside PHP and think "there but for the grace of God, go I".
        joelbluminator 5y ago
        PHP has declined but its by no means a dead or dying tech. Pay should be good in the good companies (Slack? MessageBird? I am sure there are some big names I dont follow the PHP world that much). What I am saying is that even declining tech can provide stable income for decades. Perl is a different story though. I dont know if the Perl people can still get jobs writing Perl.
        handrous 5y ago
        Oh no, it's not dying—there's a ton of PHP work out there—it's just that most of the PHP dev market is very stagnant, wage-wise, outside a handful of companies, in a way that most languages in wide use are not. There's also a real stigma that goes along with still being mostly a PHP person these days, I've noticed. (I was one, like... 9 or 10 years ago)
- llamataboot 5y ago
  Yet arguably, exposure to Live View turned the Rails ecosystem back towards tools like Stimulus Reflex and Hotwire, etc instead of everyone going for the very heavy Rails API + React stack which honestly is overkill unless you absolutely need a SPA or are building out multiple front ends against your backend
pmarreck 5y ago
Discord, an app with 300 million users, is apparently built on an "obscure piece of tech" >..< maybe come out from under that ruby rock and smell the dev air now and then Also, I was on Ruby since the time when it was "trying to be the next Java" (this was prior to 1.0!). All good things start out small. Anyway, after the initial learning curve, much happier working in Elixir/Phoenix than I ever was in Ruby/Rails... especially from a code-writing AND code-maintenance standpoint. Immutable-everything is the way forward (which also massively aids concurrency). It also being 10x faster and far better/easier at working in a concurrent context are also perks.
- joelbluminator 5y ago
  1. I don't know Discord that well but looking at their Github it lists Javascript, Python, Rust, C++ and Elixir (in that order). Is Elixir their main language? Their careers page has tech all over the place - Rust, Java, Python, I actually am not bumping into Elixir. Could be a coincidence but it reinforces my feeling that Elixir is not the main language on Discord (if they even have one). 2. The amount of users Discord has has nothing much to do with anything. Facebook has 2 billion users and its programming language is Hack. So Hack isn't obscure? How many people know and use Hack besides a few thousand Facebook employees? If Facebook gets 2 more billion users in the next decade will Hack become 2x as popular?
  - pmarreck 5y ago
    Elixir is the language that ties all those other languages together there and was also their first language, until they had to branch out into those other ones for performance or other reasons. > The amount of users Discord has has nothing much to do with anything The argument I was arguing against was that Elixir is niche, not argumentum ad populum. It's no longer really niche, just elite. ;)

jjdeveloper 5y ago

I see Elixir pulling in a lot of people in with Liveview, especially those in the node/react world who are getting tired of the churn and build complexities.

cpursley 5y ago

Elixir and Phoneix are more popular than ever, especially with the release of LiveView. The ecosystem and community continues to absorb refugees from Ruby and other stacks. It's such a better platform than Ruby and Rails that I won't bother writing about it here - there are already hundreds of blog posts about it. Productivity is at least on par with Ruby (I believe better) and performance on another plane of existence.

joelbluminator 5y ago
Sorry that really doesn't add up to what I see when I look at job boards, Elixir has really poor numbers. The Ruby guys who wanted to jump ship to Elixir already did so a few years ago (some of them will continue to jump ship from Elixir to Rust or Go because hey why not). So I don't know where new growth will come to Elixir. It's not just jobs, by any metric you can think of Elixir is an obscure tech, if you want I will add sources to this claim but hopefully we can agree.
- cpursley 5y ago
  You may have heard of some of these companies: - https://appunite.com/blog/top-10-elixir-companies-to-follow https://appunite.com/blog/top-10-elixir-companies-to-follow - https://elixir-companies.com/en https://elixir-companies.com/en
  - joelbluminator 5y ago
    Pepsico, Toyota ...come on now that's weak. They're not even IT companies let alone Tech. Whatsapp is running on a fork of Erlang afaik , not Elixir. Look I'm not saying no one is using Elixir, I'm just saying there's little jobs that's all. Cherry picking some famous names isn't gonna change that.
    - oblio 5y ago
      Plus these companies tend to have tens of techs stacks and hundreds of projects, you never know if what they're highlighting isn't some small internal project used by just one team and developed by more or less a lone wolf developer, with the project on life support after said developer left the company.
      - dnautics 5y ago
        Pepsico and Toyota are sponsors for elixir events on the regular.
        oblio 5y ago
        Nice!
    - regularfry 5y ago
      It's a difficult metric, that one. In part because I get the impression that high-specificity tech like Elixir and to a certain degree Clojure attract people who, once they're in the job, _never leave_, and their productivity is high enough (if you believe the marketing) that you just don't need to grow a team as hard and as fast as you would on a more "popular" stack to get equivalent outcomes. If all that's true, it's a natural consequence that better tools will have fewer job postings: you need fewer people to get the job done, and the ones you've got have really good retention. However, so will tools on the other side of the bell curve: nobody in their right mind wants to go there, either on the supply or demand side. So all popularity really tells you is where the enterprise hype machine was, five, ten, fifteen years ago such that "nobody got fired for choosing X" and "learn X! It's got a lot of job postings!" still align. But the enterprise hype machine is optimised for tools that have a very specific set of surface criteria: enormous libraries so you're not inventing anything, rock-solid vendor support so there are people being paid to evangelise it into orgs (or, like JS, are ubiquitous anyway, but I think that particular lightning only strikes once), and "easy to learn" ergonomics such that developers asymptote towards replaceable cogs in both quality and quantity. "Well respected but obscure" describes a certain sort of success, by that reasoning. It just needs enough of a community to stay alive, and that's a bit more of a toss-up. Ruby haemorrhaged people in the Rails 4-5-6 cycle as people jumped ship to node, but Rails 7 and Ruby 3 are looking extremely tasty despite that, and I wouldn't be surprised if we saw a bit of a resurgence in popularity over the next couple of years outside big enterprises. Most of the people I interview have got into tech after Rails 3 was released, and generally aren't aware of why the Rails/Phoenix/Django concept was such a breath of fresh air. I think what you'll see is that the reason Phoenix and Elixir have a "next big thing" isn't technical factors at all. It'll be a rediscovery by the new generation when someone unexpected goes unicorn and the story is "it was all down to Phoenix", even when the real factors were elsewhere.
- UnknownUser1234 5y ago
  You’re right. Software development has devolved into a popularity game.
  - joelbluminator 5y ago
    I think people may be traumatised by what happened to Perl or Cobol. They don't want to become obsolete. In reality what happened to Perl isn't the norm imo.
    - handrous 5y ago
      PHP is the more recent one. Folks who worked in PHP but got out at the right time look at all the low-paying PHP jobs (and there are lots of them!) and see mostly-PHP-experience job candidates dismissed out of hand for higher-paying jobs that would offer work experience outside PHP and think "there but for the grace of God, go I".
      - joelbluminator 5y ago
        PHP has declined but its by no means a dead or dying tech. Pay should be good in the good companies (Slack? MessageBird? I am sure there are some big names I dont follow the PHP world that much). What I am saying is that even declining tech can provide stable income for decades. Perl is a different story though. I dont know if the Perl people can still get jobs writing Perl.
        handrous 5y ago
        Oh no, it's not dying—there's a ton of PHP work out there—it's just that most of the PHP dev market is very stagnant, wage-wise, outside a handful of companies, in a way that most languages in wide use are not. There's also a real stigma that goes along with still being mostly a PHP person these days, I've noticed. (I was one, like... 9 or 10 years ago)
llamataboot 5y ago
Yet arguably, exposure to Live View turned the Rails ecosystem back towards tools like Stimulus Reflex and Hotwire, etc instead of everyone going for the very heavy Rails API + React stack which honestly is overkill unless you absolutely need a SPA or are building out multiple front ends against your backend

pmarreck 5y ago

Discord, an app with 300 million users, is apparently built on an "obscure piece of tech" >..< maybe come out from under that ruby rock and smell the dev air now and then Also, I was on Ruby since the time when it was "trying to be the next Java" (this was prior to 1.0!). All good things start out small. Anyway, after the initial learning curve, much happier working in Elixir/Phoenix than I ever was in Ruby/Rails... especially from a code-writing AND code-maintenance standpoint. Immutable-everything is the way forward (which also massively aids concurrency). It also being 10x faster and far better/easier at working in a concurrent context are also perks.

joelbluminator 5y ago
1. I don't know Discord that well but looking at their Github it lists Javascript, Python, Rust, C++ and Elixir (in that order). Is Elixir their main language? Their careers page has tech all over the place - Rust, Java, Python, I actually am not bumping into Elixir. Could be a coincidence but it reinforces my feeling that Elixir is not the main language on Discord (if they even have one). 2. The amount of users Discord has has nothing much to do with anything. Facebook has 2 billion users and its programming language is Hack. So Hack isn't obscure? How many people know and use Hack besides a few thousand Facebook employees? If Facebook gets 2 more billion users in the next decade will Hack become 2x as popular?
- pmarreck 5y ago
  Elixir is the language that ties all those other languages together there and was also their first language, until they had to branch out into those other ones for performance or other reasons. > The amount of users Discord has has nothing much to do with anything The argument I was arguing against was that Elixir is niche, not argumentum ad populum. It's no longer really niche, just elite. ;)