I understand the desire to appear in a list like this. We want the language to grow in popularity and persist for many years. Having said that, it’s really important not to assign any negative meaning to Elixir’s absence from this list. I don’t think it’s possible to express in words the number of different types of selection, sampling, and confirmation bias that are present in this type of survey. Only the faintest hints of methodology are actually on the site, with most of it black box. The survey treats SO like a gold standard. It avoids all sorts of nontrivial confounders, like people having more SO questions in challenging languages, or languages having a better forum (like this one).

How is it really determined that Rust is more loved than TS? What does it really mean when they make that statement? Does it reflect your actual experience? Does Rust have “An Adoption Problem” or not? Is it perhaps time to admit that all these hot takes are unscientific clickbait?

Elixir and it’s ecosystem + community are amazing. Your actual experience tells you that. Don’t be gaslit into doubting what you see firsthand every day. If you’re worried about it, don’t focus on SO, instead donate to The EEF, where you can have a meaningful impact via people who have made the promotion of this ecosystem their life’s work.

There was this question…

You search for a coding solution online and the first result link is purple because you already visited it. How do you feel?

Last day I was searching a solution for an Ecto problem… I found one, it was mine I gave a year ago to somebody on this forum.

I answered amused, but only because there was no weird option

I never said here my startup failed because of the language. Elixir actually turned out to be quite a good (or I’d say AWESOME?) choice and the reason that made the product be more than I could have ever imagined.

I was answering the question that someone asked me: “which were the pains that you faced”? So, I just described the pains we went in the beginning because of choosing an exotic language and ecosystem, in the context of 2015 and 2016. That’s very different than blaming the language or saying that we failed because of it.

Btw, I even have a talk from 2017: To Hell And Back:

https://speakerdeck.com/alfredbaudisch/to-hell-and-back-why-choosing-elixir-to-build-a-startup-from-scratch-was-both-a-terrible-and-an-awesome-decision

Most of those points are not valid anymore (except the lack of workforce, which still holds). If I ever started from scratch, I would still pick Elixir. More than ever.