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Comment by jongjong | Hacker News Reader

Elixir gets way too much coverage on HN considering that so few people use it.

Unfortunately Elixir doesn't solve any problem which isn't already solved by more popular languages such as Golang, JavaScript/Node.js, Java, C# or Python and the result is neither more efficient nor more maintainable... But its lack of adoption is a problem as it limits your ability to access many powerful libraries and tools that are available when using other more popular languages.

Programming languages aren't so different from spoken languages... Linguists can nit pick various pros and cons of different languages but ultimately it's not an author's language which determines whether or not their novel will earn them a Pulitzer prize in literature... Yet there is a good reason why no serious author will write a novel in Klingon (and it has nothing to do with the characteristics of the language itself). Same goes for programming languages and programmers.

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You can not directly compare a functional language with a bunch of imperative languages and if you really believe that Elixir doesn't solve any problems compared to those others then that is a strong indication you haven't spent enough time with all of those just yet. Please refrain from telling us what HN spends too much coverage on, the reason Elixir gets a lot of coverage is that the more experienced you are as a programmer the more you will come to appreciate the Erlang/BEAM/Elixir eco system for the strengths that it brings to the table.

In my opinion - which you may well disagree with - it is one of the most mature programming environments available with the caveat that it is less suitable for very high performance number crunching (but there are workarounds for that), and that by the time that you have the equivalent of the various Erlang/BEAM infrastructure components up and running in any other environment you probably would have time left over if you had done the same thing in Erlang/BEAM and it will be more solid besides.

Dumb remarks about Klingon are not going to make you any friends here, keep in mind that for a new person to a language any programming language looks like Klingon and it simply takes time and exposure to familiarize yourself.

All I'm saying is that language popularity and size of the ecosystem is very important... So important, in fact, that whatever marginal advantages Elixir proponents may perceive are irrelevant. The language just doesn't define the writer nor the coder. A good coder using a so-called 'horrible' language will produce much more maintainable code than an average coder using an 'amazing' language. OK, some languages are more geared towards certain problems, but how much better does Elixir have to be for a particular problem to warrant all the downsides (especially in terms of network effects)?

Does not sound like you even read the intro of the language, otherwise you would know its selling points (#1 is having predictable latency even on very bursty workloads).

Also, a gentle reminder that you don't determine what gets posted on HN. No point getting ticked off by it, maybe you should disengage from HN every now and then, it helps mental health.

> nor more maintainable

My humble opinion is that it is more maintainable. Additionally: more fun to use, has less warts than the other languages mentioned and provides really powerful tools out of the box in an easy-to-use manner. I'd be interested in a study observing work stress levels of employees using various languages - my assumption is that Elixir users have less stress.

Unless you are arguing that HN is arbitrarily prioritising Elixir related content then it’s getting exactly the amount of attention it deserves.

I love how all of the example langs you used make me want to claw my eyes out (except for maybe Go which I don’t know much about).

How much hands-on experience do you have with Elixir and Phoenix?

At the end of the day, every programming language can be used to solve problems, but you need hands-on experience to be able to judge the ease of writing, reading and maintaining a codebase in that ecosystem.

I fully agree. And since you are talking about popularity of languages in Web backend dev, don’t forget about PHP, which is still the silent beast in this area.

Yeah, everyone here is creating code in Elixir/Lisp/Haskell -- languagesI almost never see on any job board or job description

again, its fine to use them, just they get far too much attention for the amount they are used in the wider world

For reference, Django has been downloaded roughly 2.8 million times in the past week while Phoenix has been downloaded 240k times. There's no doubt that the user base of Elixir is smaller, but it's not as tiny as you seem to think.

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