Coming from someone who went from hacking out PHP projects to using Elixir, and only having three years total dev experience, switching to Elixir was tough. It probably took me a month where I felt like I was productive, and three before I started to understand processes and pattern matching and Gen Servers where I could really utilize them properly.

There’s just a lot that’s different. Now, I’m looking for a job and I mostly know Elixir, and it’s making it difficult to find stuff when all you really know is how to write code in a (good, but) relatively unused language.

So Elixir was your second language after PHP? If so, I would take that with a grain of salt. Learning your first programming language is really hard because it's all new. Learning your second language is really hard because it's all different. After that it gets way easier because you start being able to see the analogies and commonalities between all languages. Each new paradigm - ie. more procedural to more functional going from PHP to Elixir - is a bit of a hump as well, but still easier than from the first language to the second.

Depends a lot on the programming languages though. Learning two similar languages doesn't help as much with the third language.

Those concepts are common in most functional languages. The path to Scala, for example, is pretty short.

Asking out of curiosity, do you not think that learning Elixir would make you much better at something like Node?

Functional programming is not vastly different from other popular programming languages.

There is also a wealth of tutorials, books, and interactive learning resources for Elixir that are up to date. I'm not really sure what you're referring to

More than FP, the parent may have been referring to OTP and how Elixir (Erlang actually) deals with concurrency. It is indeed quite different from other popular languages.

That said, for a lot of Rails-style CRUD work I think a lot of the OTP stuff can remain murky, at least until you get comfortable with the rest of it.

>I'm not really sure what you're referring to

Maybe this is the problem, then. I'm not the only one saying it, it was said in the article and other people are saying it here too. You can pretend a problem doesn't exist, but that doesn't make it true.

> I'm not the only one saying it, it was said in the article

Which article?