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Elixir 1.11

elixir-lang.org

11–20 of 104 posts

Re: Elixir 1.11

#11
post #3

I started to learn Elixir and Phoenix awhile ago. I liked it but stopped due to (i) there's no job opportunities near me for Elixir and I wanted to the learning/projects I do on my own to help me in interviews; and (ii) it's not a strongly typed language which I have come to learn is my favored type of language

> near me

You are experiencing the same global pandemic the rest of us are, right? Remote work and all that? (It’s honestly not for everyone. I prefer some physical facetime myself or I... “get disconnected”)

> not a strongly-typed language

While this guarantees elimination of a class of bug, pattern matching plus guards cover most of the potential bug surfaces there IMHO. I know the language creators have been considering some directions to go, there

Re: Elixir 1.11

#12
post #7
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also the online Erlang docs are arguably even more utilitarian than iex docs output...

That made me laugh, but it's true. The Erlang docs are like 1980's brutalist architecture. Functional but utilitarian. But it's great to have the Erlang docs in IEx; it's my favorite docs interface.

"Functional BUT utilitarian" ?

You mean "Functional AND utilitarian" because for me these both are very welcome features.

Re: Elixir 1.11

#13
post #3

I started to learn Elixir and Phoenix awhile ago. I liked it but stopped due to (i) there's no job opportunities near me for Elixir and I wanted to the learning/projects I do on my own to help me in interviews; and (ii) it's not a strongly typed language which I have come to learn is my favored type of language

> near me You are experiencing the same global pandemic the rest of us are, right? Remote work and all that? (It’s honestly not for everyone. I prefer some physical facetime myself or I... “get disconnected”) > not a strongly-typed language While this guarantees elimination of a class of bug, pattern matching plus guards cover most of the potential bug surfaces there IMHO. I know the language creators have been consi…

Pandemic or no pandemic, most jobs are at least local to the country. If he is from Russia it's way harder for him to get a job in a U.S / EU company. Also - if it's hard for him to get an Elixir job now (and let's assume he knows if it's hard or not and heard of the concept of remote), while Elixir is past it's peak, is it a good bet to keep going the Elixir route?

Re: Elixir 1.11

#15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> near me You are experiencing the same global pandemic the rest of us are, right? Remote work and all that? (It’s honestly not for everyone. I prefer some physical facetime myself or I... “get disconnected”) > not a strongly-typed language While this guarantees elimination of a class of bug, pattern matching plus guards cover most of the potential bug surfaces there IMHO. I know the language creators have been consi…

Pandemic or no pandemic, most jobs are at least local to the country. If he is from Russia it's way harder for him to get a job in a U.S / EU company. Also - if it's hard for him to get an Elixir job now (and let's assume he knows if it's hard or not and heard of the concept of remote), while Elixir is past it's peak, is it a good bet to keep going the Elixir route?

Also, looking at the numbers in the UK on Linkedin: 132 Elixir jobs for the entire UK (ruby has 1941, php has 4832, java 10973). I'm not saying it's impossible but 132 mentions is not a lot. And it's not as if no one is fighting you for these Elixir jobs, quite a few people still want these jobs. Is Elixir still being chosen for new projects by startups or is it all python / go / rust ? The numbers for Elixir are very low.

Re: Elixir 1.11

#16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> near me You are experiencing the same global pandemic the rest of us are, right? Remote work and all that? (It’s honestly not for everyone. I prefer some physical facetime myself or I... “get disconnected”) > not a strongly-typed language While this guarantees elimination of a class of bug, pattern matching plus guards cover most of the potential bug surfaces there IMHO. I know the language creators have been consi…

Pandemic or no pandemic, most jobs are at least local to the country. If he is from Russia it's way harder for him to get a job in a U.S / EU company. Also - if it's hard for him to get an Elixir job now (and let's assume he knows if it's hard or not and heard of the concept of remote), while Elixir is past it's peak, is it a good bet to keep going the Elixir route?

What exactly leads you to believe that Elixir is past its peak?

Re: Elixir 1.11

#17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> near me You are experiencing the same global pandemic the rest of us are, right? Remote work and all that? (It’s honestly not for everyone. I prefer some physical facetime myself or I... “get disconnected”) > not a strongly-typed language While this guarantees elimination of a class of bug, pattern matching plus guards cover most of the potential bug surfaces there IMHO. I know the language creators have been consi…

Pandemic or no pandemic, most jobs are at least local to the country. If he is from Russia it's way harder for him to get a job in a U.S / EU company. Also - if it's hard for him to get an Elixir job now (and let's assume he knows if it's hard or not and heard of the concept of remote), while Elixir is past it's peak, is it a good bet to keep going the Elixir route?

> “Elixir is past it’s peak”

I would really appreciate any data that backs this up. Or is this a personal observation written as if it was a consensus? Because if we are going by personal experiences, the community definitely feels bigger and more active than before to me.

Re: Elixir 1.11

#18
post #3

I started to learn Elixir and Phoenix awhile ago. I liked it but stopped due to (i) there's no job opportunities near me for Elixir and I wanted to the learning/projects I do on my own to help me in interviews; and (ii) it's not a strongly typed language which I have come to learn is my favored type of language

> near me You are experiencing the same global pandemic the rest of us are, right? Remote work and all that? (It’s honestly not for everyone. I prefer some physical facetime myself or I... “get disconnected”) > not a strongly-typed language While this guarantees elimination of a class of bug, pattern matching plus guards cover most of the potential bug surfaces there IMHO. I know the language creators have been consi…

That is a good point and I am working remotely in my current job until next year at least. I think my time and effort is best put into trying to get a job in the tech stack I know at the moment rather than trying to switch.

Re: Elixir 1.11

#19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pandemic or no pandemic, most jobs are at least local to the country. If he is from Russia it's way harder for him to get a job in a U.S / EU company. Also - if it's hard for him to get an Elixir job now (and let's assume he knows if it's hard or not and heard of the concept of remote), while Elixir is past it's peak, is it a good bet to keep going the Elixir route?

Also, looking at the numbers in the UK on Linkedin: 132 Elixir jobs for the entire UK (ruby has 1941, php has 4832, java 10973). I'm not saying it's impossible but 132 mentions is not a lot. And it's not as if no one is fighting you for these Elixir jobs, quite a few people still want these jobs. Is Elixir still being chosen for new projects by startups or is it all python / go / rust ? The numbers for Elixir are ver…

People who are hiring for roles using smaller languages know that there are few people local to them who are practitioners in the language. They tend to do one of two things about that:

1. They don't even bother advertising a position in local geographical "general" job boards. (Job postings on LinkedIn cost money for every day you have them up; they're a waste of resources if you can predict with high confidence that nobody will find the role through there.) Instead, they'll advertise globally but targeted to the language's community (i.e. language-specific job boards, forums and chat groups, newsletters, etc.) This is where the people using the language are looking, too, anyway, because they also know that there are too few local opportunities for it to make sense to invest the time in checking local job-boards for a job matching their skillset.

2. They don't bother hiring for the language. Instead, they hire for "experience with [relevant language paradigms]" and "experience with any of [similar, more-popular languages]" and then expect the new hire to learn the language on the job.

My personal job-criterion for hiring Elixir devs is "a polyglot in several different language paradigms, fluent in at least one functional language." I find that that filter actually predicts better whether they'll be a good Elixir dev, than actual experience using Elixir does.

-----

As an aside, there's also the fact that languages like Erlang/Elixir (or the MLs, or the Lisps, or Prolog, or...) tend not to be languages used for everything in a company, but instead tend to be languages used for the secret sauce core component of a company. A lot of the time, companies don't talk about using these languages, even though they do, because they consider them a competitive advantage over their rivals in whatever niche they occupy.

Heroku is an obvious example: much of their architecture was written in Erlang [nearly everything at first], but they never advertised that fact once in any official capacity. Likewise, HFT firms never mention they're using ML or Prolog, but many do, because trading bots are often just souped-up expert systems. The only time you find these things out, is when having a beer with ex-engineers from those companies.

Re: Elixir 1.11

#20

The official release announcement can be found here: https://elixir-lang.org/blog/2020/10/06/elixir-v1-11-0-relea... It provides more context, links, and other improvements over the CHANGELOG. I am not sure if it is possible to update the link in the post though.

@dang can update it
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