4 ms·

I have come to the simple conclusion that yeah if a tech is great and people are not launching products internally or as startups then maybe it's time to intros

by dzonga 1y ago

I have come to the simple conclusion that yeah if a tech is great and people are not launching products internally or as startups then maybe it's time to introspect. if using elixir supposedly gives a competitive advantage, why aren't companies using to launch new products - both existing and startups. a lot of those things quoted in the article are present on the jvm platform or through containers. and btw some of those companies listed have migrated away from elixir e.g brex and discord.

thibaut_barrere 1y ago
Companies _are_ launching products with it ; that you aren't hearing about it is more about communication & leverage, than about their existence. A while back there was an effort to give more publicity on precise cases here https://elixir-lang.org/cases.html https://elixir-lang.org/cases.html ; I think the effort is now moving to advertising the platform outside Elixir circles (e.g. more generalist conferences). FWIW, I'm working on https://transport.data.gouv.fr https://transport.data.gouv.fr, Elixir-based since 2016, the National Access Point to transportation data, which includes a business specific reverse proxy with a 3x YoY growth, with no plans to migrate :-)
wavemode 1y ago
There are a large number of companies using Elixir, in small or big ways: https://elixir-companies.com/en/companies https://elixir-companies.com/en/companies Elixir also does not stand alone - the storied history of Erlang/BEAM in mission-critical distributed systems needs no introduction. Elixir lives within, and benefits from, that same ecosystem of libraries and tools. So yeah I'm not sure what you believe there is to "introspect" about, nor to what end.
weatherlight 1y ago
3 out of 5 of all the phone calls you've ever made was managed by a box somewhere running the Erlang VM (BEAM) which Elixir gets all its concurrency and parallelism from. And no, Discord has not moved away from Elixir. While they have adopted Rust for certain parts of their infrastructure, Elixir remains a core part of their backend, particularly for real-time communication and chat infrastructure.
em-bee 1y ago
maybe it's time to introspect to learn what? that the language was not good enough? that it wasn't marketed well enough? that there was not enough community support? not enough word of mouth? lisp users say they have a competitive advantage, as do smalltalk users. even pike at a time had a competitive advantage in that it was/is more performant than other similar languages. some of us in the pike community kept asking ourselves why pike is not more popular. the syntax is not obscure. roxen was a killer webdev server, 10 years ahead of its time. but no takers. why? (probably a mix of lack of marketing and community support/encouragement from the financial backers, but other languages become popular without backing, so what gives?) my point is that most times there is nothing you can do. unless you have the marketing power of sun (java) or google (go, etc), popularity of a language is mostly a case of luck and serendipity (ruby, python) or filling a unique need that no other language could (javascript, rust)
cosmic_cheese 1y ago
I’m not so sure that popularity has any kind of correlation with capability, quality, viability, etc. That has more to do with marketing, social media trends, buzzword compliance, and what’s caught the eye of the current crop of resume-driven developers and managers. Tools like Elixir which are focused on solving problems, aren’t flashy or easy for web dev influencers (yes, they’re a thing) to tout, and have a bit of higher barrier to entry are probably at a disadvantage in this way, even if they’re actually quite good. This is why the industry is stuck on a revolving door of JS frameworks and the n-hundreth React self-reinvention. It’s not about how good any of this actually is, it’s about how well it scratches the itch for that new car smell while also being easy to pick up and make grand declarations on social media about.

by dzonga 1y ago

thibaut_barrere 1y ago

Companies _are_ launching products with it ; that you aren't hearing about it is more about communication & leverage, than about their existence. A while back there was an effort to give more publicity on precise cases here https://elixir-lang.org/cases.html https://elixir-lang.org/cases.html ; I think the effort is now moving to advertising the platform outside Elixir circles (e.g. more generalist conferences). FWIW, I'm working on https://transport.data.gouv.fr https://transport.data.gouv.fr, Elixir-based since 2016, the National Access Point to transportation data, which includes a business specific reverse proxy with a 3x YoY growth, with no plans to migrate :-)

wavemode 1y ago

There are a large number of companies using Elixir, in small or big ways: https://elixir-companies.com/en/companies https://elixir-companies.com/en/companies Elixir also does not stand alone - the storied history of Erlang/BEAM in mission-critical distributed systems needs no introduction. Elixir lives within, and benefits from, that same ecosystem of libraries and tools. So yeah I'm not sure what you believe there is to "introspect" about, nor to what end.

weatherlight 1y ago

3 out of 5 of all the phone calls you've ever made was managed by a box somewhere running the Erlang VM (BEAM) which Elixir gets all its concurrency and parallelism from. And no, Discord has not moved away from Elixir. While they have adopted Rust for certain parts of their infrastructure, Elixir remains a core part of their backend, particularly for real-time communication and chat infrastructure.

em-bee 1y ago

maybe it's time to introspect to learn what? that the language was not good enough? that it wasn't marketed well enough? that there was not enough community support? not enough word of mouth? lisp users say they have a competitive advantage, as do smalltalk users. even pike at a time had a competitive advantage in that it was/is more performant than other similar languages. some of us in the pike community kept asking ourselves why pike is not more popular. the syntax is not obscure. roxen was a killer webdev server, 10 years ahead of its time. but no takers. why? (probably a mix of lack of marketing and community support/encouragement from the financial backers, but other languages become popular without backing, so what gives?) my point is that most times there is nothing you can do. unless you have the marketing power of sun (java) or google (go, etc), popularity of a language is mostly a case of luck and serendipity (ruby, python) or filling a unique need that no other language could (javascript, rust)

cosmic_cheese 1y ago

I’m not so sure that popularity has any kind of correlation with capability, quality, viability, etc. That has more to do with marketing, social media trends, buzzword compliance, and what’s caught the eye of the current crop of resume-driven developers and managers. Tools like Elixir which are focused on solving problems, aren’t flashy or easy for web dev influencers (yes, they’re a thing) to tout, and have a bit of higher barrier to entry are probably at a disadvantage in this way, even if they’re actually quite good. This is why the industry is stuck on a revolving door of JS frameworks and the n-hundreth React self-reinvention. It’s not about how good any of this actually is, it’s about how well it scratches the itch for that new car smell while also being easy to pick up and make grand declarations on social media about.