It’s all very inconsistent.
Stack overflow shows Elixir growing and Erlang declining. Google trends suggests Erlang is fairly flat and Elixir is growing.
NickLong
juhalehtonen
I got curious reading this thread, so I went straight to the source of the matter and contacted TIOBE regarding their ranking of Elixir. Here’s what I heard back from them:
Thanks for your feedback on our TIOBE index. We still track Elixir. The problem is that it dropped out of the top 100. Currently it is at position 104, that’s why it is not visible in the TIOBE index publication of January. I am quite confident that Elixir will be in the top 100 again soon. I hope that this answers your question.
As suggested above by michalmuskala, it appears that Erlang and Elixir are not combined in this index (as I explicitly asked if this was the case).
However, I wouldn’t concern myself too much with the TIOBE index (or other measures of popularity) either :). Various other metrics tend to suggest that Elixir is on the rise, and we community members have first-hand experience of how the ecosystem has grown and matured over time.
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MikeAnthony
Yeah…definitely would help with adoption. Firestorm just wasn’t what I was expecting after the kickstarter.
0
goofballLogic
kelvinst
C’mon, you have to choose one! Just forget JS and live happily ever after with us! 
But seriously, I guess that you would never be able to follow both ecosystems and communities. Elixir is not that much fast yet, but JS stuff changes every second day.
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goofballLogic
Yeah you’re right. I helped edit the Elixir in Action book because I love learning new things but I’m unlikely to introduce it at work where there are still struggles for people to learn basic JavaScript.
Seriously considering something Elixir / Erlang-related next time I jump jobs though. I loved the Elixir I learned editing that book, but I sort of feel like it would be cheating to not learn Erlang first.
As someone with 15 years of OO programming (C# etc.) under my belt, I always tell people that Erlang is the best implementation of OO principles I’ve ever seen ; )
A job doing WebAssembly in Elixir would be fun I reckon.
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adolfont
Just for the record:
More than one year later, I have just observed that Elixir is not in the " The Next 50 Programming Languages" of the “TIOBE Index for August 2018” TIOBE Index - TIOBE
It was in that list a month ago TIOBE Index | TIOBE - The Software Quality Company
and many months before.
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AstonJ
We are working on that 
Currently forum threads are not being counted so we need to make some changes that will enable them to go towards the index 
2
michalmuskala
The index had some weird fluctuactions recently - like Erlang going from 0.15% to 0.4% and back to 0.15% month after month. At the same time Elixir also disappeared for a month, but then came back.
6
leifericf
I have just nominated Elixir for the TIOBE Index, which many companies use to gauge the popularity and traction (general trends) of programming languages.
Elixir meets the requirements:
Q: How may I nominate a new language to be added to the TIOBE index?
A: If a language meets the criteria of being listed (i.e. it is Turing complete and has an own Wikipedia entry that indicates that it concerns a programming language) and it is sufficiently popular (more than 5,000 hits for
+"<language> programming"for Google), then please write an e-mail to tpci@tiobe.com.
At the time of writing, their Google search term returns 21 600 hits for Elixir.
While the value of such ranking systems are questionable, I think it is valuable for marketing purposes to get Elixir out there on people’s radar; including non-technical business people.
I hope it will get accepted to and added to the list.
Edit: Oh! I didn’t know there was already a thread for this topic. Thanks for merging, @AstonJ.
Edit #2:
Response from TIOBE (copied from email):
Thanks for your mail.
We have tracked Elixir now for some years. It is entered the top 100 several times, but it is currently at #106. That’s why you don’t see it in our TIOBE index overviews.
You can see all programming languages we track at TIOBE Index - TIOBE.
I am quite confident Elixir will be back in the top 100 soon because I agree with you that it is quickly gaining traction. I hope that this answers your question.
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