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Comment by mbrain | Hacker News Reader

Do you see a future in Elixer/Phoenix? And how do you like it?

I often do a word count of languages and technologies in the monthly "Who's hiring" posts here. Elixir/Phoenix gets less mentions than Erlang - often there would be at least one position that says they use Elixir, sometimes none.

Small point: this is how all popular languages once started. Much like the stock market, there's value in being balanced on the forefront of a technology along with a solid footing in an established technology. Having no balance in either direction is the only "risky" career move.

I once ran a language popularity site thing, and I think jobs are something of a trailing indicator. It takes a while for people to hire for whatever hot new thing is out.

I've beeen learning Elixir in the past few months and I can tell I'm definitely confident it's a good investment. Will use it fairly soon in production, first to implement ETL / streaming / batch processing of data (without Phoenix) then later for APIs (with Phoenix).

Another way to look at it is that Erlang has been there for a long time (longer than both Python and Ruby), and it is not going away soon.

Elixir and Phoenix may or may not last, that I don't know, but they are a joy to work with.

Now that the JavaScript trend is transitioning from "cool hipster language" to "a language that Wal-Mart uses", room is being made for a new language fad. Elixir/Phoenix seems like it may be a good candidate.

Why not learn to use Erlang instead of trying to make Erlang "feel kind of like Ruby" ?

As far as LFE goes.. implementing a LISP-1 on top of erlang seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to do, but why invent some new funky syntax (elixer) ?

If you think Elixir is about syntax or about making Erlang look like Ruby, you should really watch this talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lqo9-pQuRKE

Syntax is the first thing José Valim discards on the talk, he then goes on to talk about polymorphism, collections, tooling and so on.

Also, both Elixir and LFE have two namespaces, so none of them would be equivalent to a LISP-1.

I'm much more excited about LFE personally. (http://lfe.io/)

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