I saw in another post they said the language is mostly done and now they’re going to focus on adoption and spreading the words to companies and devs.

This basically is really good news since Erlang is quite a small language too. Coming from Scala having such a huge amount of syntax and keywords. Erlang and Elixir language are refreshing in being small and compact.

The idea is that Elixir has all the building blocks necessary to build libraries on top of it. Think of it as stable in the LTS sense or the Clojure sense rather than abandoned. To turn the question around, what features do you think are still missing that cannot be built on top of everything that already exists? Bugfixes and such will obviously still happen, and if something came up that could not be completed externally, they would add them to core. But at this point, I’m not sure what those things are.

I saw both talks in person. I take it to mean “there are no breaking features (in the semantic versioning sense) in the plans for Elixir.” Feature enhancements will continue, but things are pretty stable, so build upon this foundation. I worry it is misconstrued.

I was in the room for this talk and I don’t think he meant it like you’re interpreting it. He didn’t mean done as in finished, complete, no more work being done on it. He meant stable. In that talk, Bruce emphasized the 1 breaking change since 2014 I believe. That was a call to the enterprise, to those who are change averse out of necessity. Elixir is stable, he was saying, so it’s safe to come join us.

If you couple Bruce’s talk with Jose’s, you get the sense of a language moving very much in the direction of Python and the PSF. That’s a very good thing for Elixir in the long run. Far from being done, it basically means that it’s getting started for real now.

To be brief… You say “done”, which makes Elixir sound like a project in and of itself, rather than a tool to complete other projects. Maybe it is? I don’t know. Many people have worked exceptionally hard to create a language, ecosystem of libraries/frameworks and a community that together is an outstanding tool.

Concerns over the direction of a language/framework/library, it’s adoption, it’s perception, etc are closely linked to the notion of languages as fashion items. These are matters for those seeking the language-du-jour, rather than a reliable tool with which they can work.

So, regardless of whether more work is done, or what exists will simply continute to exist (does that equate to stagnation?) — I and many others will continue to use Elixir for what it is: the best tool for the work I do.