You're right. Elixir doesn't pretend to do anything except make using the wonderful erlang VM/OTP stuff easier.
The VM is an absolute marvel of engineering, and it's insane to me that it doesn't have more adoption yet in big tech companies.
My best theory is that engineers in top engineering companies are actually not the best engineers but simply career engineers that learn one skill (python/java/C++) and then explain to every employer that this technology is the best for the problem they have, over and over again.
Coordination problems get more difficult in larger teams/companies. Getting everyone to use a particular non-standard language is a coordination problem. Thus large companies are unlikely to experiment with languages.
It makes sense too - say it's 10x easier to write something in language X than Y. If there's only 10 other people that might interact with the thing / have to read the sources, that's a great tradeoff. If there's a thousand other people that might have to at some point understand how some part of your code works, suddenly all of them have to learn the new language X.
> and it's insane to me that it doesn't have more adoption yet in big tech companies.
elixir (and winter) is coming
> My best theory is that engineers in top engineering companies are actually not the best engineers but simply career engineers that learn one skill (python/java/C++) and then explain to every employer that this technology is the best for the problem they have, over and over again.
The VM is an absolute marvel of engineering, and it's insane to me that it doesn't have more adoption yet in big tech companies.
My best theory is that engineers in top engineering companies are actually not the best engineers but simply career engineers that learn one skill (python/java/C++) and then explain to every employer that this technology is the best for the problem they have, over and over again.