Functional programming is and has been, getting more popular, but I think it's hard to argue that it doesn't impact language uptake. Popularity is hard to judge as for every article about it, say 50 people bookmark it to read later, 10 read it and 1 try it, and outside of that there are 10,000 devs who never even clicked the link. That ratio isn't as bright as it appears initially. (1)
I also think the deployment story was a bit muddy with Elixir/Phoenix initially, with a few speed bumps.
Now Phoenix has a "generate dockerfile" command, as well as more explicit tooling around configuring releases, which I think is a good move.
Also it's easy to miss that when you build an Erlang/Elixir release (on the same architecture as your target AFAIK) you actually do get a transportable package (not a single binary) that ships the BEAM runtime etc, so you can actually just rsync the dir somewhere and run it if you want. Deployment even outside of containers is actually pretty easy. I think this is actually undersold by the documentation/community. It's surely no single-binary-multi-arch Go story, but it's easily done.
Personally I think it's 110% worth it.
Anecdotally, Did people say the same thing about python somewhere in it's 30 year span? "If it's so good why is perl cgi still so popular", "It wont ever be as fast as C", etc.
Similarly, Rails came out at a time where webframeworks were ... Symphony? Webforms? None really had the wow that Rails had, but it's not uncommon now so unseating it is a larger task?
1. I think probably Haskell, Clojure and F# probably have the widest "name a functional language" penetration and they all have some baggage. Haskell, IMO most known by osmosis, has obscure syntax and terms, Clojure (probably known of if you write Java) has (what some would term) the dreaded parenthesis-itis and F# has the C#/windows history. Probably some self-biasing here but I think many programmers first exposure will be via Haskell because that's what sticks in your mind as "oh yeah, people say that's cool", then repeatedly bounce off it's pretty dense syntax, terminology and type/side-effect strictness.
Functional programming is and has been, getting more popular, but I think it's hard to argue that it doesn't impact language uptake. Popularity is hard to judge as for every article about it, say 50 people bookmark it to read later, 10 read it and 1 try it, and outside of that there are 10,000 devs who never even clicked the link. That ratio isn't as bright as it appears initially. (1)
I also think the deployment story was a bit muddy with Elixir/Phoenix initially, with a few speed bumps.
Now Phoenix has a "generate dockerfile" command, as well as more explicit tooling around configuring releases, which I think is a good move.
Also it's easy to miss that when you build an Erlang/Elixir release (on the same architecture as your target AFAIK) you actually do get a transportable package (not a single binary) that ships the BEAM runtime etc, so you can actually just rsync the dir somewhere and run it if you want. Deployment even outside of containers is actually pretty easy. I think this is actually undersold by the documentation/community. It's surely no single-binary-multi-arch Go story, but it's easily done.
Personally I think it's 110% worth it.
Anecdotally, Did people say the same thing about python somewhere in it's 30 year span? "If it's so good why is perl cgi still so popular", "It wont ever be as fast as C", etc.
Similarly, Rails came out at a time where webframeworks were ... Symphony? Webforms? None really had the wow that Rails had, but it's not uncommon now so unseating it is a larger task?
1. I think probably Haskell, Clojure and F# probably have the widest "name a functional language" penetration and they all have some baggage. Haskell, IMO most known by osmosis, has obscure syntax and terms, Clojure (probably known of if you write Java) has (what some would term) the dreaded parenthesis-itis and F# has the C#/windows history. Probably some self-biasing here but I think many programmers first exposure will be via Haskell because that's what sticks in your mind as "oh yeah, people say that's cool", then repeatedly bounce off it's pretty dense syntax, terminology and type/side-effect strictness.