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Comment by user5994461 | Hacker News Reader

Don't use. You're gonna be in big troubles to recruit developers who knows that tech.

It's already an issue with Erlang. It's made 10 times worse with Elixir.

We are hiring Elixir developers at talkjs.com and find it to be a very easy way to interest good developers. A lot of people have been hobbying with elixir and want to use it at work but can't in their current job. Also, currently it is hardly ever someone's first language so we pre-select to relatively experienced programmers.

Why do they have to know the tech before? A good engineer can always learn new tech and I think as a developer who belongs to a company who uses Elixir in production, most of my colleagues who use Elixir didn't know about it before getting hired.

And if they happen to love the tech, which seems common with Elixir, then they might also want to stick around longer. Uncommon technology can give a team cohesion.

It backfires when they leave and they are very difficult to replace.

Are you hiring developers who can't learn new languages?

Learning languages and using them to develop an actual production-grade product are two different things.

Pick something proven.

I worked in a Scala shop and people spent tons of time flailing about arguing over syntax, dealing with bad IDE plugins / slow tools, etc. They'd have been better off just sticking with Java.

I would say Erlang VM is already proven.

I agree. So use Erlang VM and Erlang language, don't use Elixir yet...

Elixir and Erlang have similar symantics, compiles to same byte code. You can use any Erlang library in Elixir without any overhead, all the tools (debugging, profiling) which works with Erlang works with Elixir.I don't see why you can use Erlang and not Elixir.

If it slows the team down significantly and that speed is not regained in either performance or development time, then I personally would not hire developers to learn X new language.

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