Ask HN: Why isn't Phoenix/Elixir more mainstream?

Rust is significantly more discussed than Haskell ever was. Haskell barely ever had more than a couple hundred comments / posts. Rust has thousands.

Haskell was never discussed more than Ruby or Python and you can go to the archives to prove it. This year, Rust is more popular than Ruby and Python combined for discussions on Hackernews.

Erlang's goal was never to be your company's message bus. Or your k8s. Even hot restarts have always been advertised as an extremely specialized feature, justified only for very specific use cases. So you are right, if someone wants to use Erlang for these specific purposes, then I would ask them to triple check their decision.

> Other features, while nifty, like process restarts with new code, just turn out to be more niche than the brochure may advertise. That's a super important feature for phone switches, yes, absolutely, but it's never actually been something I need

Agree/disagree. I agree that fault-tolerance must not be an application developer concern. However, it is a huge plus to know that my web server, connection pool, ML serving, and other essential libraries are backed by supervisors instead of crashing and getting into a unknown state. And those are errors a type system won't catch anyway: "oops, your database sent a tcp packet you were not expecting, good luck!"

> the integration itself is a feature that very few other platforms can compare with! While I can find every feature now in other languages and environments, I will be putting together a stack of my own somehow, which can be beneficial, but is also definitely a cost of its own too.

Agreed and that's precisely the selling point. If you have to build an application that needs to concurrently talk to several APIs, or perform background processing, or do real-time messaging, or distribute machine learning workflows, then you can build such application using Erlang/Elixir without bringing Kafka, Redis, or much else into the equation. Replicating this elsewhere will often require stitching three or more technologies together, which become additional techs to learn, master, and maintain on every step of development, test, and production.

In any case, I still find it "incorrect" (sorry, I can't think of a better word) to judge Erlang and Elixir by the unmet potential of its _exceptional_ features. Even if you strip distribution, hot code swapping, supervisors, they are both excellent dynamic languages with concurrency capabilities that are not seen on other mainstream dynamic languages (although I am obviously biased). If you are chasing system-level performance or static-typing though, then they are obviously not a good fit.

Ultimately, I find the question of adoption is way less technical and rational than most people expect to. That's something we often hear about technology in general, and I don't think programming languages, frameworks, etc, are much of an exception. :)

That's a cop out excuse. On the Discord, Slack, and Elixir forums, there are hundreds, if not thousands of devs looking for work.

Often it is lamented that nobody can find enough Elixir engineers, but they also seem to have a very hidden agenda here. Executives just want the job done, and Elixir can do it, but all too often the trope of not finding enough resources is lauded about as a reason to stick to LANGUAGE_MANAGE_HEARS_ABOUT_MOST (Python, JS, RoR, et al).

Everyone also only wants Super-senior-staff-principal engineers for Elixir roles, with 20 years experience, and can live code a project to perfection in 3 hours. Maybe realize that as the community grows and engineers adopt to the language, it's ok to bring in early-careerist resources, or others who just are getting started out. Give them a book, some assistance, and keep working with them, and it doesn't matter who knows it at first, in 6 months you'll have a rockstar team.

If you're all alone, there are still tons of guides, books, blog posts, et al. Documentation is a first class citizen in Elixir, and theresIf you're on a good team, they'll get you resources. If you're on a bad team? {shrug}