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Comment by astrowilson | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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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