I'm really glad to hear that, because to me it does seem like Elixir is the FPL that is closest to satisfying a GSD mentality and not getting caught up in too many interesting rabbit holes.
We (Ockam.io) are definitely building very real and critical things with Elixir. We filled our remaining open position for it last week though so we’re not currently hiring for an Elixir person. Just wanted to point out there’s definitely companies out there that value it for non-academic reasons.
What was your method for hiring; were you looking for Elixir people who can come in hot, or people interested in it specifically that want to learn, or just "good software people" who'd be WILLING to learn it, or something else entirely?
I wasn’t the hiring manager for those roles, so I’m not 100% sure. If by “can come in hot” you mean people with existing Elixir experience, then based on who we hired I’d say that previous experience would have been required.
I find being a "builder's FP" more true of something like Rust than Elixir, in my experience. This is mainly due to the lack of static and algebraic types in Elixir, which makes debugging very difficult, as well as more annoying to reason about the problem domain, because you can't represent it in types as well.
> lack of static and algebraic types in Elixir, which makes debugging very difficult
In about 6 years of working with Elixir, I've found it easier to debug than pretty much every other language I've ever worked in. But to be fair, I've mostly been working on code I've written myself in that time (although you'd be surprised what you forget in a year and then go back to).
You can also add typespecs; I know it's opt-in, but it's something, and it will get checked.
Algebraic types are orthogonal to functional programming.
Functional Programing can be static or dynamic.
Also, Rust isn't an FP language, per say, it has way more in common with the imperative programming paradigm with some ergonomics lifted from the ML family of languages, specifically around it's type systems.
Answered already, but in $previousjob we had a team named that, for the reason given. I thought it was kind of clever but unique - 3 jobs hence I work for another company that has the same, so maybe more ubiquitous than I'd thought.
I'm really glad to hear that, because to me it does seem like Elixir is the FPL that is closest to satisfying a GSD mentality and not getting caught up in too many interesting rabbit holes.