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Comment by ChrisMarshallNY | Hacker News Reader

This is a fairly classic rant. Many have gone before, and many will come after.

I have found that it's best to focus on specific tools, and become good with them, but always be ready to change. ADHD-style "buzzword Bingo," means that you can impress a lot of folks at tech conferences, but may have difficulty reliably shipping.

I have found that I can learn new languages and "paradigms," fairly quickly, but becoming really good at it, takes years.

That said, it's a fast-changing world, and we need to make sure that we keep up. Clutching onto old tech, like My Precioussss, is not likely to end well.

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What do you think of Elixir in that regard? It seems to be evolving in parallel to current trends, but it still seems a bit too niche for my taste. I‘m asking because I‘m on the fence on whether I should/want to base my further server side career on it. My main income will likely come from iOS development for at least a few more years, but some things feel off in the Apple ecosystem, and I feel the urge to divest.

Ive been working in Elixir since 2015. I love the ecosystem and think its the best choice for building a web app from a pure tech/stability/scalability/productivity perspective (I also have a decade+ experience in Ruby on rails, Nodejs, and Php laravel, plus Rust to a lesser extent).

I am however having trouble in the human side of it. Ive got a strong resume but I was laid off in Nov 2024 and Im having trouble even getting Elixir interviews (with 9+ years of production Elixir experience!). Hiring people with experience was also hard when I was the hiring manager. It is becoming less niche these days. I love it too much to leave for other ecosystems in the web sphere

Thanks for sharing your perspective. FWIW, I hope you'll find a nice position soon!

Dawww thank you!

I couldn't even begin to speak to Elixir. Never used it.

Most of my work is client-side (native Apple app development, in Swift).

For server-side stuff, I tend to use PHP (not a popular language, hereabouts). Works great.

I like PHP. It has a raw power that is really nice to have in web development.

Elixir is similar but concurrency is a 'first class citizen', processes instead of objects, kind of. It's worth a look. I've never used it but there's a project for building iOS applications with the dominant Elixir web framework, https://github.com/liveview-native/live_view_native .

Elixir can be used for scripting tasks, config and test rig are usually scripts. In theory you can use the platform for desktop GUI too, one of the bespoke monitoring tools is built that way. Since a few years back there are libraries for numeric and ML computing too.

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