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Comment by kitsune_ | Hacker News Reader

Judging from past experiences here on HN and other programming echo chambers, I'd wager that Elixir is currently at the beginning of its hype cycle (somewhere between 'technology trigger' and 'peak of inflated expectations' if you go by Gartner). So I'm almost certain that you will eventually see "Why Elixir was bad for us..." posts upvoted on here or in other places.

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Elixir hasn't gone through the usual hype phases because it's just syntactical sugar, less boilerplate and more modern than Erlang making it more palatable for Ruby/Python devs.

The BEAM VM is what makes all this possible and the BEAM VM has been around for decades.

No matter how good Elixir is, at some point the hype will reach a point where many people will try it having wild expectations, and will get disappointed. This is just the way hype works :)

If you search for Elixir on HN and sort by popularity, 10 of the top 20 results were submitted during the past 12 months (Which in itself might be just related to an increase in users here on HN, but compare the results to languages like Java or Haskell).

Many of my dev friends with hipsterish inclinations jumped on the Elixir hype train in the past year or so. I really don't see how this is different than past "hype phases" of other technologies.

Oh, sure, there'll be some people who regret it, but the key difference is that it isn't going to run into some of the same problems that plague other new languages because it fundamentally isn't a new language.

It was interesting reading some opinions from older Erlang folks. They are mostly supportive but disliked a few things about Elixir such as reassigning variables which they thought broke immutability.

I think if you replace Elixir with Erlang, the beginning of the hype cycle argument goes away since now we are talking about rock solid software backend that is decades old (from the 1980s) and powering a large chunk of the telephone switches in the world.

If I am not mistaken Elixir is primarily a front end that generates code for the Erlang VM (BEAM) supported by the Erlang OTP backend.

Having said that the questions remains, why doesn't Erlang get the same hype? I am hazarding a guess that a majority of developers still work in the imperative style and switching to the functional side takes a bit of relearning in the way you think.

I don't understand this argument. Elixir is still its own distinct thing, the fact that it compiles to BEAM byte code is secondary in assessing whether it is currently in a hype cycle or not. Just like Clojure, Eta, Scala, jErlang or the myriad of other languages that run on top of the JVM can be hyped independently of the JVM or Java.

Erlang did get the same amount of hype, probably multiple times in the past 20 years. So did many, if not most reasonably well-known languages, programming paradigms, architectural solutions, databases, frameworks and so on.

I do not make any judgement about the merits or maturity of Elixir itself. Elixir is perfectly fine.

As developers we should have a healthy dose of skepticism when it comes to blog posts that claim 10x speed improvements with technology X. Was it just the rewrite? Does your use case match mine? And so on... In short: Everything is a trade off, and there is no silver-bullet.

Elixir has a much more "standard" syntax so its naturally gonna have a lower barrier to entry.

It's not really the syntax. Elixir's semantics are simply better than Erlang.

Erlang accumulated a lot of worts, but it never really got rid of them.

I don't think Syntax matters all that much. Smalltalk's syntax is pretty odd, but its regular and simple to explain/understand, so people quickly come to like it. Smalltalk's VM's though are a huge barrier to entry.

Erlang is the reverse: great VM... great architectural decisions... great libraries.... questionable language semantics.

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