How do other languages, like Python, scale better to more devs, besides more devs available? All that comes to mind immediately is modules in Elixir being globally available, but I’m genuinely curios about your experiences.
Thirdly, Elixir devs are on average quite senior in general (as they are usually refugees from other stacks) which lends itself to one-man armies very well in my almost 8 years of experience working with Elixir.
We scaled an org with both Ruby and Elixir (later, 1 of the 2 blessed languages) and there was no tangible difference in that way.
You could also scale in other ways like microservice. Elixir plays great in that world, as pretty much every language does.
Regarding one man armies. Usual way I've seen to scale is to find those one man armies and put less expensive Jr + mid engineers on their team and have them work together. I don't think that's an Elixir thing though.
I'm not trying to sell Elixir here. I think it has benefits in smaller org size that mellow out and equalize as a company grows. Also, startups should always work in whatever language is most comfortable to founding team.
RE: microservices, yep, that's one of the ways to scale Elixir teams to more people indeed.
RE: one-man armies, agreed.
> I'm not trying to sell Elixir here. I think it has benefits in smaller org size that mellow out and equalize as a company grows.
No worries, I am sold for 8 years now. ;)
And yes, the benefits kind of plateau from one dev count and up I found. That was kind of the core of my comment, too.
> Also, startups should always work in whatever language is most comfortable to founding team.
Oh, absolutely. I love Elixir a lot but won't shill for it if I find myself in a situation where it would be a bad choice. Plus in startups development speed is probably the biggest asset of the programmers so I am not judging. (Though I don't want to work for startups anymore.)
Does stepping on each other's toes happen, of course! but no worse than typescript, java, etc.
I don't buy this argument.
There is also the fact that the companies I chose to work with didn't want a lot of Elixir devs and we truly made miracles happen with teams of 2 to 8 people.
