Awesome experience write up.

Question for you and OP, do you find that using languages like Elixir makes it so you have to look for a certain kind of dev given that Elixir is a pretty niche community or are folks with no experience able to adapt with relative ease?

Not one of the OPs but can happily echo their experience/praise for PETAL and think I can answer your dev search question:

Anyone with a can-do attitude can learn Elixir. People with a “no thank you, I already know XYZ” mindset you really don’t want on your team.

Almost 20 years ago @pg wrote the “Python Paradox” post: www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html

The same holds true for Elixir (and Rust) these days. The people you want to hire are those who learn new skills/languages proactively.

However I can confidently say, from experience of having hired several Python devs/data scientists with zero Elixir experience, that smart+motivated people can learn Elixir in a couple of days and be productive within a week. See: https://www.verytechnology.com/iot-insights/elixir-for-pytho...

I'd argue the other way. Yes anyone with a can-do can learn Elixir. But there's a difference between learn and LEARN..

I work with a pile of rails devs writing code in elixir. In that I mean you can feel the rails in their code. It "tastes" like rails. A few python devs also write python with elixir syntax.

Finding people who know the language is hard. Finding people who are willing to risk their time on the language is also hard.

By risk. If I spend 2 years writing Elixir and then go looking for a job I'm looking at getting a job with a language that's not popular. So my pool of place that will even look at me is smaller. Hiring managers/gate keepers might not see..

After 12 years of c++ I got a job where I needed to code in Delphi-Script for a year. When I told recruiters what I'd been doing I got "Oh.... Okay um... We'll call you."

I switched to rails for 6 months (same job) and recruiters were calling me non-stop. Working in low popularity langs limits my options. (even if they are great langs)

I'd say picking a language that's not yet popular limits your pool not just to the can-do's, but also to the can get my next job with this on my CV.

Isn't Elixir a little bit like Ruby though? At least superficially. And it supports metaprogramming like Ruby.

So I'd guess the code would end up looking similar on a lot of teams

There is development joy found in both, but Elixir and the underlying erlang definitely has it's own idioms.

You can know enough to get going quickly, but there's a healthy layer of power that will only come with time.

Took me a year before I found a dev/manager that even scratched at that power. A dev that pushed me to learn it. Before that I was a rails dev writing elixir. :)

I should mention there is no problem not going there. I respect my teammates. Ruby/Rails is a great way to get things done. I would 100% use it as my MVP lang.

It's a little bit like ruby.. But

It's not object oriented, it's a functional language. It is polymorphic and all data is immutable. (Edit: actually realised its very much not like ruby, when I re-read this)

What I've seen in most projects is that the awesomeness that is threading (tasks and processes) is not really used. Supervisors aren't built as first class citizens.

I see teams eat the cost of NIH, but not get the benefits of crash fast, crash often.

So yes it does end up looking/smelling like ruby/rails but it really really shouldn't.

“A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing.”

I like the quote at the end, I would change knowing to learning though

That nailed what I wanted to know. Thanks!

I didn't want to confess, but yes you're right. Elixir (or the willingness to learn Elixir) is a great filter for me to find the right people. Again, this is my purely subjective opinion and might as well be true for other languages as well.

I'll more or less echo what nelsonic said.

No one where I work has come in with Elixir experience. We look for people that are motivated to learn. Elixir has been one of the easier languages in my career to learn, and I think others that I work with would agree with that.

The degree of difficult with learning Elixir/OTP depends on what one needs to learn. Phoenix web development has its own domain of learning requirements where as other domains have theirs. Learning Elixir is one thing but learning OTP, and then learning how to make sound decisions about design/architecture, is far more demanding of effort and time. "How do others solve this?" leading to github search tends to fall far short of what one would find with other language ecosystems.

Moving from Python/JS -> Elixir at a startup seems very high risk, have the rewards been worth it? I can imagine issues with hiring, unknown unknowns, and less libraries/support in general.

I know-- I was scared like hell. But after the first week and multiple staging releases in less than 10 days, I was on top of it. Yes, hiring is real challenge and am facing it already. However, if I, even as a startup, reach the salary threshold, then hiring is not a problem. I'd say I've yet not found a case where I couldn't find a library for my use case.

The start-up I work for uses Phoenix and Elixir. I've been there around two years now and we haven't experienced any issues with hiring or finding skilled people. If anything, I'd point to Elixir as being one of the major factors of our success.

We are a remote company, so things may not be as easy, depending on your location, if your company demands people be in the office.