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Comment by joelbluminator | Hacker News Reader

I am free to say what I want about Elixir, I make it no secret. It got most of its (now faded) hype by trashing Ruby, which rubbed me the wrong way. I genuinely believe Elixir is an unsmart career choice , my feelings about Elixir aside. Without a big corporate backing it and never making it into the top 20 languages during it's peak (which is now passed) there is only one way - down. It has nothing to do with Elixir as a language and everything to do with how saturated the market is. As a career it's not a great main language in most areas of the world; sure the superstars will get by nicely. But if you're average you're better off with one of the popular stacks. OP is free to choose what he wants but I don't see how any of what I say isn't true, maybe you'll enlighten me.

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Joel, I wish you'd stop appearing in every popular Elixir post's comments to say something bad about the language or ecosystem. You've admitted in previous discussions that you've never even used Elixir, so why even comment on a post asking about personal development experiences with the language?

>It got most of its (now faded) hype by trashing Ruby, which rubbed me the wrong way.

It's a programming language, not a sports team. Developers excited about a new language are allowed to be excited and compare with other languages. I don't know what trashing you saw that offended you, but commenting on every HN post to try to steer people away is unproductive.

I don't think I'm gonna stop soon, sorry. For one I really do think Elixir is a horrible career choice and I wanna save young average developers who still have time to correct that mistake (the superstars will do fine no matter what). And second every time I see "Elixir is better Ruby" I get more and more pissed off. If I ever stop reading those things I may slow down about Elixir but you guys just keep me going.

I have read your comments in this thread and your remarks push me more away from Ruby/Rails than Elixir/Phoenix. My first thought was: "wow, some Ruby developers are so insecure about their tech stack that they feel they must criticize other technologies in programming forums to get by". It looks very unprofessional and immature. So think carefully on what you want to achieve, because if your goal is to drag another programming language through the mud, you might drag yours in the process instead.

I don't think my comments have anything to do with you wanting to do Elixir, please go ahead with that sir, I don't know you and don't care honestly. I think it's not the greatest decision career-wise but as I said if you're a top 10% developer you'll do fine no matter what tech you choose. If you're not you are most likely to regret it eventually. Elixir is actually a great place for superstars now since it's so small; you can much more easily make a name for yourself there than with php/go/ruby. But for your average web developer Elixir brings very little value. As for insecurity - Elixir as a community started to count page views(!) on ElixirForum to show how the community is thriving. Any other metric - Tiobe index, Stackoverflow, Redmonk, amount of jobs, they're all ignored or gaslighted. So who is insecure? Us Rubyists already took the blowback hit, we know we aren't cool anymore. Elixir is facing that now and in the coming years. And again, if I wouldn't have read countless posts about how Elixir is superior to Ruby (always to Ruby, not to other stacks), though the 2 languages don't have much in common at all, I wouldn't have had such an axe to grind, but I got sick of it.

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