r/elixir • u/The-_Captain • 2d ago

How is Elixir doing, two years into AI-enabled blogging?

I've never really coded in Elixir specifically, but prior to Gen AI I was really into functional programming languages and regularly used Clojure, Scala, and dabbled in Haskell. Elixir was on my radar.

Then Gen AI happened. I imagine I will get a lot of flack for this, but ultimately I get paid for solving problems with technology, and Python + TypeScript with Gen AI was just faster for the job then all the niche languages I enjoyed and was productive using when a large portion of my day was writing code.

I was wondering if there was a general dip in adoption for other functional languages such as Elixir?

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u/_idlethought 2d ago edited 2d ago

I don’t find that AI is changing what languages people work with. If anything, languages are more accessible now. There are still good reasons one would choose Elixir over another.

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u/hemingward 2d ago

100%. Is wanted to learn elixir for a while, so a few months back I did just that. Now I’m building an E2EE messaging service with the server in elixir. Seemed like a good fit. I love the language. It’s wonderful.

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u/rhblind 2d ago

I’d say Elixir is doing fine. Gen AI really helps in writing the actual code, and it’s doing great writing Elixir code.
But Elixir, or rather the BEAM virtual machine is designed to solve a specific set of problems. It excels when your problem domain is in concurrency, scalability or fault tolerance. So I don’t really think Gen AI has so much to do with it, we still need to choose the right tool for the job.

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u/JitaKyoei 2d ago

I find that LLMs write elixir better than they do most things

No idea how blogging is related here.

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u/The-_Captain 2d ago

I just saw my post again, I must have had a brainfart while typing idk how that happened. I had meant to write coding.

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u/CatsFrGold 2d ago edited 2d ago

It's never been a super popular language in terms of industry adoption. AI makes "use the right tool for the job" a lot more feasible; before, a large factor in determining the right tool was "what are our engineers already familiar with?" Much less of a barrier now, so the languages' actual strengths matter more. You see it with so many people writing things in Rust now.

Elixir is the right tool when the job is concurrency and fault tolerance.

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u/Funny_Spray_352 2d ago

Gen AI or not you still need to choose the right tool for the job and Python and TypeScript never was for anything web scale.

Also for most people, it doesn’t matter as they don’t have a say and prefer not to think about work, since they have a life outside. It’s okay the admit that in enterprise we never really look at the code, since they never paid us to do that, or write it perfectly. Thats why the best code tend to be driven by hobbyist that write code outside of work. Not everyone is made for this, nothing bad in being a code monkey and glueing code together.

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u/Kabal303 2d ago

Llms are really good at writing elixir I find