Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2019 results are in.

Key results:

• Elixir is used by 1.6% of Professional Developers (Python 39.4%, Ruby 8.9%, Go 8.8%, Scala 4.2%)
• Elixir is the 8th most loved language with 68.2% (Rust 83.5%, Python 73.1%, Clojure 68.3%, Go 67.9%, Scala 58.3%, Ruby 50.3%, Erlang 47.4%)
  “loved” = % of developers who are developing with the language or technology and have expressed interest in continuing to develop with it
• Erlang is the 6th most dreaded language with 52.6% (Ruby 49.7%, Scala 41.7%, Go 32.1%, Elixir 31.8%, Clojure 31.7%)
  “dreaded” = % of developers who are developing with the language or technology but have not expressed interest in continuing to do so
• there are little developers who don’t work in Elixir or Erlang but want to try them out
• Elixir and Erlang developers are among the top paid ones

The takeaway seems to be that people are really happy with Elixir once they get on board. The opposite seems to be true for Erlang. I’m honestly curious why. I would hope that it’s because people would rather move to Elixir, but that might be just wishful thinking.

Relatively few people want to try out Elixir or Erlang. Is this just a matter of limited popularity or we’re just bad at advertising the strong sides of Elixir?

I think it has more to do with where the centre of gravity of the existing developer population (voting on stack overflow) is. It seems to be around JavaScript, Python, Java, C#, PHP etc.

From there Elixir/Erlang syntax wise, functional and process oriented, without OOP support looks like a pretty weird and unfamiliar place. It takes some time to become competent in your first programming language and when it comes time to branch out people are often not that willing to move too far away from their comfort zone - i.e. they will tend to stay pretty close to that centre of gravity. Learning something as different as SQL can be challenging enough but at least the potential for short term ROI is pretty good on that one.

I seem to recall that at least initially a significant portion of the people interested in Elixir were experienced (long time) developers who have been using mainstream languages and runtimes long enough to be more aware of their limitations and shortcomings. The appearance of Elixir just made it a little bit easier to try Erlang’s process oriented architecture and flavour of functional programming.

Aside: How did WebAssembly even get on that list - it’s a compilation target, not a programming language.

Which I actually quite enjoy, more so than Elixir’s syntax actually…