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Comment by bsaul | Hacker News Reader

Elixir / erlang is not just « not the #1 ». I don’t think it’s even in the top 99% of the programmer’s population commonly used language. once you’ve removed people using c/c++, java / kotlin, dot net, javascript, ruby php and python, you’re left with a really fringe minority of people. And even in that minority, i would say erlang / elixir isn’t even in the top 2 ( my guess go and rust have a much wider audience)

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In the Fintech space and we use Go and Elixir. Seems to be pretty common among other companies. Company is out of Utah. It's pretty easy to find talent for Go and a little more difficult for elixir.

Elixir people might cringe but why wouldn’t you just be 100% Go?

Go people might cringe but why wouldn't you just be 100% Rust?

Actual response: Some similarities, different goals, different strengths, different abstraction levels. Go is cool I hear but I don't see a need from over here doing Elixir.

In a concurrent environment Go is not guaranteed memory safe, leaving you exposed to silent errors of value ... which for Fintech is just suicidal.

Because we live with our past decisions... All new services are in Go. The elixir service serves us well still.

Curious: why did you move from elixir to go ?

Why not 100% Elixir, since it is more robust and uses less resources?

I'm still on a hiatus but if you need a senior Elixir and Rust dev that knows Golang okay, we can chat.

21 years of experience in total, including in C/C++ and Java.

Same with betting space, there's few Elixir shops

I looked at past sponsors of Fintech devcon, Elixir shops are well represented.

No need to suppose, there are decent sources for this.[1][2] Go seems to be much more popular than you expect. Elixir and Erlang are both pretty obscure.

[1] https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#technology-most-popula... [2] https://madnight.github.io/githut/#/pull_requests/2023/1

The irony is that for all its obscurity, most startups are using at least one mission critical service that runs on elixir -- slab, pagerduty, elixir, ramp, divvy, discord. brex is probably still half ish elixir, though they claimed to be wanting to replace it with kotlin when they got some new tech leadership. I wonder how that's going. I remember working at a startup where the cto was unsure about putting trust in elixir, claiming it was an "unproven entity". I pointed out to him we used THREE of those services, do if he didn't trust elixir we should probably pivot off of those products.

I doubt the reservation is with the language/runtime itself, especially with elixir and the BEAM. More likely, it’s with the maturity of the community. Especially at a small startup, building on elixir even today might still mean having to build things in house you may not in Django/Rails/JS.

Phoenix exists, so I don’t think that’s true.

Indeed. This was covered later in the article on characteristics that may alter the perception of a high-leverage toolchain…

More good & relevant information + libraries -> more acceptance (i.e. my use case is no longer a tech uncertainty)

The other thought would be that if you didn’t have to do anything yourself then you must have no moat.

The moat comment depends on the company, not all or even most businesses depend on actual innovation as their moat.

Also, I think we’re agreeing here, but there are a huge set of things that you may need to build an application that aren’t the core value prop of your company. Buying into a more mature ecosystem makes it more likely that you don’t have to build those things and can spend more time on the moat stuff.

Indeed, I think you are quite right, and we are in agreement.

I think you are overestimating the intelligence of that CTO

It's only obscure professionally; it's also one of the most loved languages. [same survey]

https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#most-loved-dreaded-and...

I was surprised to see how low it is on the Want list, even though it's only second to Rust in the Love list.

Simply put, many developers don't yet know they're gonna love it!

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