> This is a bizarre criticism of Elxir the language. There are a lot of developers out there who prefer a more lightweight editor and do not want the bells, whistles and crutches of a heavy duty environment.

Right, but...there are also developers out there who do want those things.

It feels very dismissive to dismiss a complaint like that as "petty" just because there's a set of people who don't have the same needs. I feel like it's a very useful piece of information about the language that doesn't feel at all petty to me.

If you don't want the IDE-like tooling, then you can read the comment and think: "ah, they want more tooling than I do, so this critique doesn't apply to my use-case". If you do want that style tooling, then you might read the comment and think: "Ah, that's good to know. That applies to me, and I'll definitely take it into consideration".

Someone having priorities that are different from you doesn't seem "petty" to me. It just seems...like different priorities.

Exactly. One of the MOST valid criticisms of a language is the way (or lack of ways) in which it can be used.

Don't focus on tooling, focus on their complaints about not having enough senior engineers familiar with the language.

We're in a similar boat. I don't know the full history of how we came to use Elixir, but I would wager that early on in the company, someone really loved it and evangelized it. But now, we don't have that many senior people who know it well. I can count the ones I talk to regularly on one hand, and once I run out of fingers, I'm probably sixth place runner up, which makes me very uncomfortable.

That's why I wouldn't suggest Elixir. Unless you're incredibly sure you won't have significant churn for the lifetime of your business, or have money to burn specifically hiring Elixir folks, I wouldn't recommend it.

This is not the fault of Elixir. It’s the fault of trigger happy CTO’s who chase shiny new objects without thinking about the long term, big picture. I’ve made plenty of unsexy decisions when my heart was pulling me in a different direction - because it’s the right thing to do based on the team you have or the direction you’re headed.

Adopting Elixir, like Clojure or Haskell or any of the more esoteric languages is a commitment. Don’t do it if the benefits aren’t there or you aren’t willing to make the investment.

> This is not the fault of Elixir.

That's very true. But it's still something to consider, especially for OP who's choosing a new language for a new project.

What do you think has been the difficulty for people at your company learning it?

I encounter a lot of devs, especially experienced devs who pick it up very rapidly compared to what I've ever seen with JavaScript, ObjC, Rust or other most other languages I've spent time with.

For simple things like "add field to GraphQL schema, hook it up to a resolver, and read some data from the database" - doesn't take too long.

The language itself is very different from the C-like imperative languages most everyone knows, so there's a bit of a ramp-up from that, but for basics, people can be released into the codebase within a month.

But when things go wrong, or when you need to do something more complicated, things get difficult. It's much more difficult to google around for solutions. When Dialyzer is spitting out strange errors, hunting down their causes and solutions is challenging without someone who understands it around.

I feel like 99% of Typescript/Ruby problems have been encountered and enshrined in Stack Overflow and the like, but Elixir doesn't have that sort of volume.

It's a fun language, and worth learning, and I played around with it in a side project, but quickly started running into conceptual roadblocks when it came to (no surpise) the GenServer stuff, and how to actually spin up a stable service that does things in some given way. I probably could have stuck with it, but at that point it felt more like toil than joy, so I decided I'd rather do something else with my time. I'd be fine with going to work for another company working with Elixir, provided that there were people there who can swoop in from above and help me solve my problems.

what area/work does your company do? advertising?

> I would never complain about a language just because an IDE does not exist for it.

I think their complaint is valid, especially in light of their finding it difficult to find experienced coders who are in their salary range.

New coders can lean heavily on a good IDE to help: code completion, breakpoints, step wise debugging, one click links to the docs, easy code navigation, and more. Senior coders can and should use the editor of choice, but a great IDE makes a world of difference for a junior or even intermediate coder.

I haven't used elixir but used erlang for a while, with emacs. It did have a learning curve, but I don't think an IDE would have helped.