I asked this very same question on twitter and got some interesting feedback, but I thought it would be a good question to ask here as well—though people leaving our humble community might not follow this forum…but.
Have you (or do you know someone how has) moved away from Elixir ? If so, why ?
Personally I really like Elixir for the problem it is good at, soft-real-time server systems; and that is what I do the most. But I think it is good to hear why someone would move away from Elixir.
In the current context, Croatia, it is difficult to introduce the language. Since there are default language/tools preferred in the region (it can be argued in general), I’m heavily investing time in Rust, even though it’s contradictory, and even more extreme to introduce that ecosystem. Current reasoning is that it is true general purpose language with a lot going for it. Still checking out this forum, because of the great pool of people and culture.
I wasn’t even able to introduce it at work. Most german companies just hopped on the NodeJS hypetrain and they are too stubborn to move away from it for quite a time I guess.
But I use Elixir for all my private stuff and don’t plan to move away from it.
I might have a soft talk about strategies for introducing Elixir to a company. You need to find a low-risk project and create a service that need little attention, just do what it is supposed to. At some point they will notice that this node has just been running for years without much maintenance.
The realisation that developers often talk about their passion and managers often talk in dollars/euro is a good one. It is a hard sell that the initial setup might be costly, but that it will pay itself back over time—it really is something they need to see and experience.
So the best way is to introduce it as a microservice, and eventually they will realise the value and want it in more places.
My home country, Denmark, is mostly run by Microsoft—so I feel your pain.
Our current customer wants to create a background worker for doing time intensive tasks. I said that it would be a good fit for Elixir but now they seem to do it in Golang. I guess they just rely on docker to restart the worker if Golang decides to randomly crash because of some faulty or outdated input.
Had the same argument at a previous employer. What did I end up doing instead? I quit and now I’m studying full time at uni which allows me to play around with the OTP as much as I want. I also plan on doing my masters in the field of distributed systems and hopefully land a job which allows me to build these incredible systems.
I did “funemployment” as well a couple of years back when my employer at the time was determined to keep using nodejs. After half a year of just waking up in the morning, reading about functional programming and coding Elixir, I got picked up by a start up (which didn’t fare too well) and eventually I got an Erlang job at a successful company.
It is a risky strategy, and I am not sure I will recommend it to everybody 
Still using Elixir, not planning to drop it. But also learning Rust, because I need to write some reliable networking code that I can reuse across servers & mobile…
I could see myself becoming comfortable with Rust enough to use it for new projects instead of Elixir, maybe, not sure, time will tell. I don’t see ever being as productive in Rust as in Elixir, but I can see the possibility of it becoming close enough. Ask again in a year 
IMHO the team should make the decision(s) about the language(s) they use, not the employer. Of course, there are constraints to take into consideration. But the employers usually have no idea about what matters in technical details. The employer probably will make their decision based on what they hear, or read, or guess what the neighbors will do. That’s why most companies still stuck in that weird Java-world.
But, really, if they pay you as a developer, they should listen to you, not to some insane industrial lobbies.
If your employer force you to use a specific language (without any comprehensible arguments) change your employer, not your language 
If you have to argue about technical stuff with your boss or manager, don’t even try technical arguments. If you don’t have economical arguments, you’ll gonna lose!
By the same argument, if leadership has no intentions of cross-training their developers into operations, or of hiring developers who are already capable of such, or of hiring infrastructure folks who are capable of supporting whatever esoteric language a team wants to ship with, they have a very strong economic argument to stick with the “well-paved roads” that don’t require any specialized infrastructure knowledge. If deployment considerations aren’t planned for up front when deciding a tech stack, it’s way too late to change course by the time it becomes a pressing concern. (Assuming you’re not standing up your early prototypes on real infrastructure as soon as possible, which IMO is healthy but can be a drag on perceived velocity.)
In regards of productivity, I don’t think that Elixir can ever be matched, even when the Rust ergonomics ecosystem develops in the upcoming period. I always imagined combining them both via rustler
Same here, Elixir has OTP though and Rust doesn’t 
I don’t see how they can compete, but combining them is a good idea.
As for why I don’t use Elixir when it would have been a good fit - there are projects where client has in house devs that for some reason are not up to an unknown stack and there are clients who are afraid of vendor lock and want something “mainstream”. These two are a pain and a source of frustration but it’s not that much I can do at the moment
Could you elaborate on what you mean by «vendor lock» ? Both the Erlang VM and Elixir are open source projects.
Sure, what you mention is one of the (if not the most important) arguments, the decision must take into consideration. Although I’m in this industry since 1986, I never saw a well-paved road. Either they are not hard enough or they not straight enough. Erlang is a rare exception. … And that is why I fell in love with Elixir 
I mean we do something in Elixir and if ever they want to switch from us to someone else, they’d have a hard time finding an alternative company. Vendor in this case being us
i still use elixir for a few use cases (mostly around GenStage, which is pretty good
) but i’ve moved away from it as a general purpose programming language
there are a number of reasons but the main ones are:
I’m shocked to hear that - I’ve certainly not witnessed any genuine or sincere criticism being reacted to poorly, at least not here on the forum 
There not being a market demand for elixir, I need to pay rent and elixir ain’t helping on that front.
I kind of have mixed feelings around this. If I had to put it into words I feel like it might have to do with strong opinions. I think maybe the community is “hard to move”? Everyone is very helpful, but at the same time maybe too critical and/or over analytical (one could argue this is a good thing!). Phoenix is a good example. It’s a great framework that solves a real problem but even it’s existence questioned. You don’t have to scroll very far to find someone sharing a new library, but it’s picked apart. Less of “Why would you do that” and more of “May I make a suggestion”. Just my 2cents.
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