Here is the list of things that I feel are still holding Elixir back from wider adoption:
1. Not enough companies sharing their experience - most companies want to lead and not follow. There has been a lot of success with Elixir but too often I've heard companies not wanting to indicate they're using Elixir out of concern that it will tip off their competition (I've heard this from two companies now, big ones) or they just don't have a culture of sharing. The most impactful case study on Elixir was one of the first, the Bleacher Report case study https://www.erlang-solutions.com/case-studies/bleacher-repor.... They did an excellent job of articulating the direct business value of transitioning from Rails to Phoenix. We need more of these stories shared
2. Lack of talent - this is a chicken or egg problem but one thing that comes up quite often. If there were more companies actively hiring in Elixir there would be more devs learning Elixir but companies are reluctant to hire for Elixir because there aren't enough devs. Most of the courses/guides are aimed at transitioning Senior level talent. At DockYard through our Academy https://academy.dockyard.com/ we decided to tackle this from the opposite end and commit to producing high quality junior Elixir engineers.
3. Higher price point for talent - the recent Stack Overflow surveys regularly rank Elixir at the top for cost. Personally I think this stat is being influenced by the fact that Elixir has a higher % of more Senior level talent so the average salary will be skewed higher. But that nuance doesn't come through in the cost rankings. If true then as the ecosystem's talent pool starts to normalize we should see this cost average out.
4. Lack of off-the-shelf solutions - Objectively Elixir is faster to build and less costly to maintain than nearly every other tech stack I've ever used. However, because it is so easy to build something we have developed a culture of "just make it from scratch" too often. When newbies ask "how do I do X" questions like auth or something else in another tech stack that they can simply add a node module or a Ruby gem in Elixir most times we lack those pre-built solutions. So the actual build cost is higher because we can't simply drop that solution in and accelerate the dev process.
I've been selling Elixir services for almost a decade at this point and I'm still very bullish on Elixir. We, along with many others, have been trying to close these gaps. It's happening but the most impact anyone reading this can make that is using Elixir is to share your experiences. Write blog posts. Publish case studies. Indicate the reduction in cost, faster times to market, etc... these are the data points that are going to be most compelling and important in the coming decade.
1. Not enough companies sharing their experience - most companies want to lead and not follow. There has been a lot of success with Elixir but too often I've heard companies not wanting to indicate they're using Elixir out of concern that it will tip off their competition (I've heard this from two companies now, big ones) or they just don't have a culture of sharing. The most impactful case study on Elixir was one of the first, the Bleacher Report case study https://www.erlang-solutions.com/case-studies/bleacher-repor.... They did an excellent job of articulating the direct business value of transitioning from Rails to Phoenix. We need more of these stories shared
2. Lack of talent - this is a chicken or egg problem but one thing that comes up quite often. If there were more companies actively hiring in Elixir there would be more devs learning Elixir but companies are reluctant to hire for Elixir because there aren't enough devs. Most of the courses/guides are aimed at transitioning Senior level talent. At DockYard through our Academy https://academy.dockyard.com/ we decided to tackle this from the opposite end and commit to producing high quality junior Elixir engineers.
3. Higher price point for talent - the recent Stack Overflow surveys regularly rank Elixir at the top for cost. Personally I think this stat is being influenced by the fact that Elixir has a higher % of more Senior level talent so the average salary will be skewed higher. But that nuance doesn't come through in the cost rankings. If true then as the ecosystem's talent pool starts to normalize we should see this cost average out.
4. Lack of off-the-shelf solutions - Objectively Elixir is faster to build and less costly to maintain than nearly every other tech stack I've ever used. However, because it is so easy to build something we have developed a culture of "just make it from scratch" too often. When newbies ask "how do I do X" questions like auth or something else in another tech stack that they can simply add a node module or a Ruby gem in Elixir most times we lack those pre-built solutions. So the actual build cost is higher because we can't simply drop that solution in and accelerate the dev process.
I've been selling Elixir services for almost a decade at this point and I'm still very bullish on Elixir. We, along with many others, have been trying to close these gaps. It's happening but the most impact anyone reading this can make that is using Elixir is to share your experiences. Write blog posts. Publish case studies. Indicate the reduction in cost, faster times to market, etc... these are the data points that are going to be most compelling and important in the coming decade.