For example, I wondered if there is a GUI library for Erlang, and the response with the most votes here [1] is that people don't write GUIs in Erlang.
The other answers point to wrappers around libraries written in other languages.
I think that is suspicious for a language that has been around for such a long time now.
[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/97508/what-libraries-can...
The problem with GUIs is that making a simple UI is relatively easy, but making a really world class native UI is practically almost impossible. Witness the fact that even Microsoft is using Electron instead of writing native GUI code.
One of the really fundamental problems is that GUIs need to be done in the native language of the OS (e.g. C++), so any scripting language either needs glue like pyqt or to talk over a socket to a GUI, which limits performance.
Having said that, you can make ok GUIs in Erlang with the wx libraries, and there is Scenic for making custom UIs for e.g. embedded systems https://github.com/boydm/scenic
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=feAW1AVzNwo
But also there are GUIs (I believe there are wx bindings) that are shipped with erlang (wobserver for example)
By and large, though people are writing servers in erlang, so building GUIs has never been a priority, and by the time erlang got a kick in butt in popularity due to Elixir, the way to write a GUI in erlang, became "write a web interface in Elixir".
Finally don't necessarily trust stackoverflow; the entire elixir community has basically left SO and gone to elixir-specific fora, which we think is why elixir dropped off the SO developer's survey.
That's very surprising to me. Do SO's metrics of questions/answers/etc reflect this? If so, why the move? Was it organic? Organized?
I left because stackoverflow is not a community, I don't give a crap about the gamification, the incorrect answers most upvoted because they provide a quickfix rather than a proper fix, and I'd rather go in places where you can have an actual discussion when you need to re-frame problems since newcomers aren't generally used to the paradigms of the VM and OTP.
Stackoverflow felt like working for free just spending time answering things for imaginary points whereas other fora have more reciprocity available through richer dynamics that can help build communities.
Stackoverflow, to me, is a last resort more than anything else.
1. It’s slow in number crunching, if you’re doing any computation it won’t be much faster than Ruby (and much slower than Python due to the scientific computing ecosystem) 2. The amount of libraries is negligible, many are abandoned, even on its home turf (networked applications). I.e. there is no maintained ssh server lib, whereas all popular languages have several. 3. To get the benefits of the platform, you need to deeply understand OTP. This is a serious learning curve. 4. Despite all the chest-beating about performance of Phoenix, it’s solidly mediocre on any benchmark (about on par with the fastest Python web frameworks). It’s okay, but nothing to write home about.
IMO that's what makes languages "great": domain specificity.
General purpose languages beg the scenario of a person who only knows 1 language and tries to do everything in that language instead of learning a more appropriate one.