Grifters – ElixirLang, Capture the Red Flag (Ep1)
Over the years (8+ professionally in Elixir), I've learned the importance of understanding the incentives that drive the existence of a programming language and its ecosystem. 'The Economics of Programming Languages by Evan Czaplicki' is a valuable resource in this regard, particularly the section on Consulting: https://youtu.be/XZ3w_jec1v8?si=lCZzbjGh3nec7smN&t=1519.

Capture the Red Flag: a programming language that owes its creation, maintenance, and promotion to the active involvement of consulting firms.

I will leave one tweet out of many others for you to understand a bit https://x.com/danielberg_/status/1828172405015278044. This is not a unique situation; it is just one example. Others will convince you that companies are hiring and keep seeking; it is not a problem. Those people who do not pay attention to #job_chat in the Elixir Slack Channel or try to find a job opportunity themselves. I will expand upon the hiring situation in another episode.

The reality is that you will be competing with the Dockyard, Dashbit, WyeWorks, and Erlang Foundations you named; if you do not believe this, take a look at https://2024.elixirconf.com/ Sponsors; if you follow the trend, you will realize that less and less "products" built with Elixir show up and more of these companies keep the boat floating. That does not even count the vast number of solo freelancers. The implication is that you will be competing with talented business people taking the job opportunity from full-time. This is a marketing and dollar sign game, not about merits or your enthusiasm for the language. I have hired them myself.

Some individuals or companies push their tools or libraries not because they're the best options but to benefit financially or boost their reputation. This creates a fragmented ecosystem with overlapping solutions. Often, these authors control significant initiatives, imposing their tools until they become the "norm," backed by inexperienced users. This increases complexity and maintenance burdens, with companies ultimately paying the price. The actual cost of these decisions is rarely discussed or quantified, allowing the problem to persist.

Look around, follow the money and incentives.

The same goes for internet educators, who teach the same Get-Started information and oversell things that they fundamentally do not understand or do not have the professional long-enough experience to back up their suggestions. I have nothing against educators existing and getting paid; I want them to get paid well, and I believe in balancing academia and professional work. At the same time, I do not appreciate their lack of responsible ownership of the outcomes they created, primarily because many folks have to take such ownership and responsibility at work with added misdirection from “famous” people. It's draining! You are better off ignoring most of the content and listening to other ecosystems.

The last set of grifters,

They want to replace your Laravel, Rails, Python, Node, you name it, with Elixir Phoenix just because it is faster, which is somewhat true. Still, they create the same architectural mess from those frameworks without properly fixing anything. If you are a CTO reading this, run away. If they are replacing the stack with the same software architecture, or even worse of the worst, “just use Elixir for everything,” bros, you are in it for a costly future. A hot potato!

There is a reason major companies are removing Elixir from their codebases, and they should; their mediocre usage of Elixir grants no value whatsoever. This problem is in part because Web+CRUD-Driven development is what drives the ecosystem.

Ep 2 is coming next.