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Comment by joelbluminator | Hacker News Reader

https://insights.stackoverflow.com/trends?tags=elixir

Now you may say Stackoverflow isn't a good measurement. In Tiobe Elixir hasn't made it to the top 50 https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/

There is little reason for me to believe Elixir is before it's peak, the data is showing otherwise. Elixir's contemporaries (Rust / Go / Kotlin) are at a totally different place usage wise. So I tend to think this is it for Elixir, it's all down hill from here. If you have data showing otherwise please let me know.

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That’s very little data to make such broad claims.

Up until 2017 or so, you could see the Elixir community active on StackOverflow with answers from José, Chris and most maintainers. Then the community collectively moved to Elixir Forum. Wouldn’t you prefer to ask questions where the maintainers can also answer? Per the Elixir Forum stats, the number of active users keep growing.

I won’t comment on TIOBE because you can find plenty of critique elsewhere. For example, in the Redmonk rank, Elixir does fairly well on the GitHub axis, and is ahead of contemporaries like Clojure and Julia, and ahead of other functional languages like Haskell, Ocaml, Erlang, and even F#.

I strongly believe Elixir is before its peak. Elixir is most likely still growing, just not at the same pace as languages like Rust or Kotlin.

> and is ahead of contemporaries like Clojure and Julia, and ahead of other functional languages like Haskell, Ocaml,

That's kinda my point. These are the languages you should compare Elixir to, the esoteric ones. Not to PHP, not to Node or not even Ruby. I doubt this is going to change much.

What I said about Elixir (lack of jobs) is also true for the languages you listed.

OK found something to help us quantify this debate https://towardsdatascience.com/these-are-the-real-stack-over...

Now this is interesting because this counts question page views, not questions asked.

You can choose Elixir in that embedded tool, it's too bad its only for 2017-2018 but it still validates my point. My guess is the numbers for 2019-2020 are worse for Elixir.

I don't see how this is any better. Most traffic on SO comes from search engines and if the questions and answers are elsewhere, such as in the Elixir Forum, then search engines will lead devs away from SO.

You say the language is in decline and none of this is solid evidence that's the case. It just says Elixir devs are not really active in Stack Overflow, which anyone in the community would be able to quickly point out.

You asked for data, I brought you the most relevant thing possible yet you keep going to "Elixir Forum". I don't think you want to hear about data, you want to hear about findings that reenforce your opinion.

Do you seriously believe that this data is “the most relevant thing possible” to assert the claims “Elixir is past its peak” and “is all down hill from here”?

I am not refuting the data, I am refuting the flawed conclusions you are drawing from it. You are taking the decline in usage of one service as an overall indicator of the community. I provided a possible explanation. I mentioned the GitHub ranks as counter evidence. But way to go on the ad-hominem.

I've dabbled in Elixir for quite a lot over the past few years, and I have to agree with the general trail of thought you're showing. If I have a question about Elixir, I don't even think about going to StackOverflow for it. I either go ask on ElixirForum, or Google for my problem (which, in most cases, lands me to an ElixirForum thread rather than a StackOverflow one). I think the surge in the use of ElixirForum is inversely correlated with the use of StackOverflow: the more the forum has grown, the less reason there has been to use SO.

I do worry about the impact it has on these "popularity tracking" services though, since the discussion living elsewhere might (falsely?) indicate that the language isn't attracting developers.

Interesting theory. Let's agree that it's inconclusive then!

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