# On "Why Elixir?"

**URL:** <https://forum.elixirforum.com/t/on-why-elixir/34038>\
**Category:** Discussions\
**Tags:** releases, elixir\
**Created:** [August 27, 2020, 7:03pm UTC](https://forum.elixirforum.com/t/on-why-elixir/34038 "2020-08-27T19:03:55Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 35

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**Author:** ![LostKobrakai](https://forum.elixirforum.com/user_avatar/forum.elixirforum.com/lostkobrakai/32/3072_2.png) [@LostKobrakai](https://forum.elixirforum.com/u/LostKobrakai)\
**Post date:** [September 1, 2020, 11:56am UTC](https://forum.elixirforum.com/t/on-why-elixir/34038/35 "2020-09-01T11:56:38Z")

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If you’re judging the usefulness of a programming language by its ecosystem that maybe should’ve been a (bigger) factor in choosing it as the platform for whatever you’re building in the first place. You’re by no means wrong in your assessment, but elixir is still a quite niche language. It’s to be expected that you might not find whatever you need in third party libraries and even less so in official libraries by companies, which are often provided by a mixture of popularity and what people within the company can program. If you’d go just by the metric of ecosystem I guess ruby, php or js are likely unbeatable.

@sasajuric’s point as I understand it is that the tradeoff for not having that ecosystem might not matter as soon as elixir/the beam does provide (greater) benefits in other places. And one doesn’t need a decade in experience to see or benefit from them. It depends on many more factors besides experience like how complex/big a project you’re working on, how stateful your service is, the “devops story” (being able to connect to the vm at runtime and observe/debug), how much moving pieces you want to deal with, …. And one still might come to the conclusion of elixir not being the correct choice.

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