Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2020

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

Lol, I’ve had the exact same experience with other issues. ^.^;

Oh. I thought it’s purple because it’s here on the elixir forum!

Elixir is not mentioned, erlang either.

Much to my disappointment, Elixir did not make it.

Interestingly, neither Elixir nor Erlang were mentioned in the results. I didn’t participate in this year’s survey, so I’m not sure if they were offered as options (or whether there was a write-in option).

This differs from previous years, where both have been present in the results in some form.

I believe the community is not big enough to produce that much issues on SO to get listed.
Secondly, there is the elixir forum where the chance to get the answer is bigger imho.

While I think that having our own ElixirForum has big advantages, I do think that one advantage to being on a big site like SO is exposure. My original impression of Elixir/Phoenix was that it is a powerful FP niche language. Now, that I have been exposed to it for 8 months, I see it as a viable alternative to Ruby/Rails and so many of the other platforms out there. I think this is probably a common experience.
The SO survey is not the end all be all of developer surveys, but I do think it has an impact with development managers for considering new languages/technologies/frameworks to explore. I think if we want to grow Elixir, we need to promote it (beyond it just being a great language/framework) with things like, possibly, encouraging people here to go hit the survey next year.

I think the interesting thing is that the 2019 survey showed that Elixir was on the Most Popular list (1.4%), Most Loved (68.2%), and Wanted (3.4%).

I’m surprised that it’s not in the 2020 lists at all.

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.