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Comment by joelbluminator | Hacker News Reader

I won't tell you what to do with it, but the fact is Elixir is not on the up, it's very niche (nichier than even Rust is) and it's probably starting to decline already. Look at Linkedin jobs

Lisp - 142 Clojure - 700 Elixir - 828 Rust - 3160 Golang - 9205 Ruby - 24353 PHP - 68444 Java - 132606

So Elixir, at its peak, has about the amount of jobs Clojure has (never knew anyone using Clojure btw). That's quite a niche, ±800 jobs in the entire U.S is very very little. You might not care or have any action items from these facts, others may. As for companies - I would never choose something like Clojure/Elixir for my startup that's quite crazy considering the small eco system.

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Sorry, where's your proof Elixir's at his peak? How can you tell from these numbers it's on the decline?

> I would never choose something like Clojure/Elixir

Then don't, nobody is making you. I still don't see why you want to stress so much Elixir is not a top language. From what I can tell, you have a bone to pick with the language and being confrontational with no discernible reason. Good day.

EDIT: checked your post history, you're definitely being a troll on purpose on most Elixir posts.

I don't think I was confrontational at all, I only listed facts on this thread. Other threads have zero relevance. Good day to you too!

You keep bringing up “Elixir has peaked” but you don’t provide any concrete evidence for that. The only mention so far is Stack Overflow, which is not used by the community, and such was explained to you on separate occasions.

Someone mentioned Elixir has just passed top 50 on TIOBE - that’s growth. It also just crossed top 20 on GitHub by number of pull requests on Q1/2021.

I am not disputing it is niche. I am not disputing the job market is tiny. But for someone who mentions acknowledging the truth, you don’t seem to be very truthful on your claims the language has peaked, especially given the last time you claimed so, you used a milestone (Top 50 on TIOBE) that has been reached since then.

The problem with Elixir is it's too small to get good data on (I'm not being mean, that's the truth). Tiobe has trends only for the top 20 languages so can't use that.

The best I've got is Stackoverflow survey (are you saying Elixir devs don't use Stackoverflow at all? I find it bizarre. Even if you use Elixir forum a modern dev has questions on many things he needs answered (css, javascript, sql etc).

So please compare https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#most-popular-... With https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020#most-popular-... Elixir was dropped from the list. That's definitely a sign of decline. Now it could be that on absolute terms Elixir is keeping it's usage but only dropping on relative terms but I find it a bit hard to believe. I have a feeling Elixir devs who look for the next gig use other tech more often than not.

It is a data point, not definitive.

The language could be shrinking in comparison to everything an still be growing. I don't think that's the case but it wouldn't change anything for me. I don't work with a proportion of client according to trends. I work with particular companies and I'm at capacity doing Elixir as are many I know.

I believe it has a stronger trend then you believe it does. But neither of us have strong data.

Aren't clients considering migrating to different tech? I'm not trying to be annoying, genuinely interested. My current company considered it and they're a Ruby shop (luckily for them they rejected the idea). The thinking was something along the lines of Ruby is declining and how will they find developers 10 years from now. So if people can get this paranoid about Ruby I'm interested how it is on Elixir land.

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