Hacker News Reader

Comment by rwcarlsen | Hacker News Reader

I think most reasonable people wouldn't have trouble defending a position that Elixir isn't a particularly "popular" language - at least compared to Go.

View on HN

I agree Go is more popular than Elixir — but is it actually a popular language? At least I wouldn't consider it mainstream in the sense Java, C# and Python are.

It doesn’t really matter where you draw “the” line for mainstream languages, so much as that there is some reasonably drawn line between Go and Erlang/Elixir.

Well, just ask the Toibe index:

https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/

It looks like Elixier ist by far less popular than the other discussed languages.

Huh, I'm super surprised that VB .NET is growing. I used it at my last job briefly for unfortunate historical reasons and we were trying to run screaming away from it as fast as possible to C#. It felt like the runt of the litter of the .NET ecosystem; so many things worked better in C#.

I personally prefer the RedMonk rankings [1] over TIOBE, since TIOBE's entirely about Google hits, which lags as an activity indicator by a few years, because sites for languages that have stopped being used stay around for years. Also, Google hits counts are really noisy, especially for languages that have names that are also words, like Go and Elixir. RedMonk uses recent GitHub and Stack Overflow activity as a proxy for popularity.

In this case though, Elixir is still way lower, at somewhere around 30th compared to Go's 14th.

[1] https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2018/08/10/language-rankings-6-1...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com