Keynote: A New Case for Elixir - Bruce Tate and Josh Price | ElixirConf US 2025

ElixirConf · September 12, 2025, 1:00pm

This talk was recorded at ElixirConf US 2025. If you’re curious about our upcoming event, check https://elixirconf.com✨
We’ve built something remarkable with Elixir. Better concurrency primitives, superior fault tolerance, cleaner functional patterns—all the architectural advantages we dreamed of came to fruition. The community is vibrant, the technology is proven, and the success stories are compelling. Yet the explosive growth many anticipated never quite materialized. We found ourselves asking: why hasn’t the broader development world embraced what we know works so well? The developer mindshare gap persisted despite our technical advantages. The learning curve remained a factor even as the language matured. We’ve been playing a long game, building for sustainability over viral adoption. But what if I told you that the entire adoption playbook is being rewritten? What if the factors that shaped language growth for decades are suddenly becoming obsolete?

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bzhr · September 12, 2025, 1:16pm

As startup job openings have declined in the past three years, all niche languages, especially newer ones are on the decline. As can be seen from the Hacker News hiring trends, most smaller technologies have lost market share. (link)

IMO there’s nothing wrong done by the way that Elixir is managed. I think that the Elixir core team and the way it is managed is world class. The easiest way to gain momentum is by being able to onboard junior developers very fast, but in order to optimise for this, some sacrifices need to be made and I don’t think that these are needed.

I also think that is is good to discuss this, but don’t get obsessed about it.