Do you or the community have a sense why that is?
> When you go too far up, abstraction-wise, you run out of oxygen. Sometimes smart thinkers just don’t know when to stop, and they create these absurd, all-encompassing, high-level pictures of the universe that are all good and fine, but don’t actually mean anything at all.
> These are the people I call Architecture Astronauts. It’s very hard to get them to write code or design programs, because they won’t stop thinking about Architecture. They’re astronauts because they are above the oxygen level, I don’t know how they’re breathing. They tend to work for really big companies that can afford to have lots of unproductive people with really advanced degrees that don’t contribute to the bottom line.
E.g. the built in telemetry system is fantastic, but when you are first adopting the stack it still takes a day or two to read the docs and get events flowing into - say - DataDog, which is roughly the same amount of time as basically every other solution.
The benefit of Elixir here is that the telemetry stack is very standardized across Elixir projects and libraries, and there are fewer moving pieces - no extra microservices or docker containers to ship with everything else. But that benefit comes 2 years down the line when you need to change the telemetry system.
With Section 174 in play in the US, it tends to drive companies hiring specialists and attempting to use AI for the rest of it.
My own experience is that ... I don't really want to draw from the most plentiful and cheapest pool of workers. I've seen the kind of tech that produces. You basically have a small handful of software engineers carrying the rest.
Elixir itself is a kind of secret, unfair advantage for tech startups that uses it.
This is a thing I really don't get. People are like "but what about the hiring pool". A competent software engineer will learn your stack. It's not that hard to switch languages. Except maybe going from Python to C++.
We seemed to do pretty well, although some of our code/setup wasn't very idiomatic (for example, I'm pretty sure we didn't use the Erlang release feature properly at all)
Admittedly, I didn't have a whole company core product riding on my upgrades.
For otp updates, we would shutdown beam in an orderly fashion, replace the files, and start again. (Potentially installing the new one before shutting down, I can't remember).
Post facebook, more of boring OS packages and slow rollouts than hotloading.
The closest I've come across was trying to maintain an ejabberd cluster and add some custom extensions.
Between mnesia and the learning curve of the language itself, it was not fun.
There are also no popular syntax-alikes. There is no massive corporation pushing Erlang either directly or indirectly through success. Supposedly Erlang breeds success but it's referred to as a "secret" weapon because no one big is pushing it.
Erlang seems neat but it feels like you need to take a leap of faith and businesses are risk averse.
Isn't there this "small" company that has a chat app that is using erlang :P
But I guess it doesn't always work that way. FB chat was built on ejabberd and then migrated away.
Also, a lot of the power of Erlang is the OTP (Open Telecom Platform) even more than Erlang, itself. You have to internalize those architectural decisions (expect crashes--do fast restart) to get the full power of Erlang.
Elixir seems like it has been finding more traction by looking more like mainstream languages. In addition, languages on the BEAM (like Elixir) made the BEAM much better documented, understood and portable.
If we're talking pure modern-tech company - good luck bringing anything other than JS because "more developers == more growth" mentality.
So it's either end up being used where decision makers know/want-to-learn Erlang/Elixir or when all other possiblity was exhausted.