Comment by pavel_lishin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pavel_lishin | Hacker News Reader

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We're currently (very slowly) working to deprecate our Elixir codebase.

I wasn't around when it was adopted, but it definitely felt like someone joined the company, evangelized Elixir, hired maybe half a dozen people who were really good at it, and then left.

Eventually, our Elixir experts evaporated, leaving maybe two people who truly understand it and can do difficult work in it. That's not sustainable.

Someone else in the comments here said that a good developer can be productive in any language, and that's true - but why hobble people? It's like saying a good surgeon can be productive with a butterknife and a pot of boiling water, or a good artist can be productive with a charred stick.

Interesting. So the people you already have can't just learn Elixir to the required standard or rather doing so is not in their self-interest.

> or rather doing so is not in their self-interest.

Nor in the interest of the company at large, to be honest. Elixir doesn't really give us anything specific for our use case that other, more popular languages, don't also offer.

From reading this, it sounds more like a management problem more than anything else. For example, retention goals should be such that all a companies experts (at anything, not just language) don't evaporate overnight and hiring goals should be such that experts are retrained and re-hired.

I think the analogy is also off a bit. I't be more apt to say a good surgeon should be expected to use electrosurgical units from different manufacturers, which is a completely fair expectation.

Interesting. So the people you already have can't just learn Elixir to the required standard.

This speaks volumes of why the Elixir people left in the first place.

As a separate point, if a company wants the most generally applicable programming language, there is no reason to look further than C, yet few companies are like this.

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