I heard the argument before that JS (and Nodejs) is popular (top 3), so you should go into it.
I’m now in a nodejs shop. Turns out, the way Erlang and Elixir is designed serves as a filtering function for hiring. People who just wants to code without putting a lot of thought into it, don’t go into Elixir and land in JS instead. (All the current coworkers I have wants to make things better but we are saddled with code that has been … oddly written)
At the last Elixir shop I was at, I was part of a small crew that was more experienced as a whole than other shops I have been at. And I liked it.
Popularity is a multiple faceted issue w/r/t quality of engineers in any given language.
One caveat to any of it is the easier a language is to grok and the more use cases it has, the more likely it will attract all types of developers and there will always be more "bottom end" developers than "top end" developers, as is patterned out in any large distribution.
That said, here's some facets to consider about this
- Its not likely its the language (or to be charitable, not just the language) at play here. As noted above, the more popular something is, the more likely you end up with a wider varieties of folks at very different backgrounds / skill levels etc. Python and PHP have similar issues.
- The more popular the language is, is often correlated to its use cases. For example, JavaScript is hugely popular in a wide swath of problem domains, from the server, to the web (its de facto monopoly right now) to desktop apps to even now mobile (Ionic, NativeScript etc). This leads to the top developers in the language often going to very lucrative positions that one would also presumably have to be working alongside or as part of to be working with them
- Its harder in a bigger pool to work with the top N % of developers in any given language or (better yet, any given environment / problem space deploying that language as part of its core technological backbone). The big "sea" in the middle is what you're most likely to be apart of
I think smaller communities benefit from organic interest, people who are enthusiastic to use the technology and therefore often the perceived quality of those developers is higher (and often it does correlate, see: the history of Clojure)
I don't think a language in and of itself is to blame, except in that maybe, because some languages like Python and JavaScript are so easy to pickup as opposed to say, Java, Kotlin, C# or Rust, that they attract more developers in general. That said, I think its the laws of distribution at work, and not really the driven by the language per se.
I heard the argument before that JS (and Nodejs) is popular (top 3), so you should go into it.
I’m now in a nodejs shop. Turns out, the way Erlang and Elixir is designed serves as a filtering function for hiring. People who just wants to code without putting a lot of thought into it, don’t go into Elixir and land in JS instead. (All the current coworkers I have wants to make things better but we are saddled with code that has been … oddly written)
At the last Elixir shop I was at, I was part of a small crew that was more experienced as a whole than other shops I have been at. And I liked it.