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Comment by _m8fo | Hacker News Reader

What's your use case?

I know depending on the use case some tools are better than others, but to clarify my original question, for someone who might just be getting into the back-end and looking towards the future, what would be a better choice to focus on, elixir or node.js? and say for example that the person has done both some Ruby and JavaScript programming, including some basic apps with Rails and Express.

Javascript is a very common language. Elixir is generally a better language, but less popular. If you're looking to get a job you could probably do either but there are probably more Javascript jobs. At the hobbyist level Node might be easier to pick up, especially if you know Javascript already.

I think Javascript is generally a safe bet for the next few years because the Frontend is firmly embroiled in Javascript as well.

Elixir seems poised to keep growing on the backend, so it's probably not a bad one to learn either.

My real advice to someone starting out would be to learn a language but focus on learning general programming and computing concepts through it. The better you are at programming and computing, the more easily you can pick up new languages and switch between them seamlessly.

Also, as you learn new languages, focus on learning the right way to do things in that language. It's extremely helpful to be able to separate programming concepts from language constructs.

All forward looking statements are guesses but... I see a strong movement toward Elixir from Ruby devs (and others, I'm not a Rubyist) and I expect Phoenix to be one of the main frameworks in the next few years. It's due to a combination of simplicity, history (erlang is old), and a change in the types of apps some of us are building. There will always be simple CRUD apps too but the demand for constant connectivity seems to be rising. IoT, desktop replacement apps, etc.

Edit: fixed typo referring to Elixir as a framework

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