This is exciting! I've been meaning to host some things on FreeBSD. Coming from a Linux background, the question of how to ship and run my applications on there becomes quite a bit more familiar through this milestone.
I recently started a new job working on a Elixir codebase. While it took me a while to understand the architecture and conventions (just like with any language, I guess), dealing with types was not a concern when it came to navigating the codebase.
Granted, the codebase uses pattern matching, type specs and Dialyzer extensively, which all definitely contribute towards making the navigation easier. Without those tools in use, I can definitely imagine navigation being more difficult.
Is it possible to share more details about your particular setup? I believe you, but this doesn't sound right. I've used the plugin on all three major operating systems in a wide variety of projects and configurations, and have never had this happen to me. Curious to learn more about what could be the culprit for you.
Apparently an incident took place in 1831 where a bridge collapsed under soldiers marching, but the Wikipedia article [1] notes that "The conclusion of the investigation was that the vibration caused by the marching precipitated the bolt's failure, but it would have failed eventually anyway".
There's more interesting information on synchronization and bridges on Veritasium's video, The Secret of Synchronization [2].
My hunch echoes that of other commenters here. That is, it seems like many core libraries have been quite steady and "complete" for a while now, and many people are just using them today to get work done. That isn't to say the language ecosystem would have stagnated, however.
One interesting piece of data comes from Elixirforum.com, arguably the central hub for the Elixir community. In their recent MOTY update [1], they announced that "..to give you an idea of how far we’ve come and how fast Elixir has been growing, in the forum’s first year we served just over 1M pages for the entire year, now, we’re serving a million a month".
The official Elixir language site has also been steadily accumulating more and more case studies [2], which one might consider as sign of health in terms of Elixir being used in the industry. Obviously it's only the success stories being told, though.
Recent news regarding Nx [3], Livebook and Axon suggest there are new doors being opened for Elixir as a language in the AI/ML space. This expands what the language can be used for, and as such, could be considered as another sign of health and vibrancy in the ecosystem.
Looking at something like GitHut [4], it seems like Elixir has maintained a steady position on its rankings in terms of pull requests. This suggests that usage of the language hasn't declined in the recent past.
Lastly, the 10-year Dashbit blog post [5] by José might highlight some other development. While "development" is not synonymous with "health", I feel like the contents can suggest lack of death :)
This topic of success and what contributes to it always makes me think back to this great video by Veritasium (aka. Derek Muller) titled "Is success luck or hard work?" [1].
While it's probably impossible to prove one way or another, I've personally grown to accept that I will never be fully satisfied with everything in my life. Accepting that fact has given me some kind of peace, because I no longer dwell on the what-ifs as much as I used to. It doesn't matter if I reach the goals I have in mind right now, as I'm bound to come up with new ones that are just out of my reach. I believe bettering oneself is good, but I also believe it's important to accept that there's never a goal to be reached there.
I've dabbled in Elixir for quite a lot over the past few years, and I have to agree with the general trail of thought you're showing. If I have a question about Elixir, I don't even think about going to StackOverflow for it. I either go ask on ElixirForum, or Google for my problem (which, in most cases, lands me to an ElixirForum thread rather than a StackOverflow one). I think the surge in the use of ElixirForum is inversely correlated with the use of StackOverflow: the more the forum has grown, the less reason there has been to use SO.
I do worry about the impact it has on these "popularity tracking" services though, since the discussion living elsewhere might (falsely?) indicate that the language isn't attracting developers.
One major thing would probably be OTP, which would be very difficult to implement as-is on top of Go. A recent comment thread [1] over at Lobste.rs explored this in more depth.
Saša Jurić made an absolutely wonderful hands-on presentation [2] of what (oftentimes rather unique) value propositions Erlang/Elixir/BEAM bring to the table. It's a very tightly-packed presentation, but I strongly recommend having a look if you're curious.
To reiterate what others here already said, success really isn't anything "universally great" to aim for. There's probably no real way to do that either, since there isn't even any universal definition of what success really means. This is especially true when everyone comes up with their own unique set of requirements for considering themselves successful. It is also way too easy to fall for the trap of moving the goalpost once you're there.
And if you felt like you hadn't reached your own definition of success, then what of it? Would that really, honestly change your life in any measurable way, or is the feeling of "not being enough" all in your head? If it is, then that also means your head holds the means to get rid of such a feeling.
I really want to recommend the book "Man's Search for Meaning" by Viktor Frankl. It was one of the greatest assets for me overcoming my own depression, and I hope it can help you battle your suicidal thoughts all the same.
You make a good point, and this is one of the reasons why I really like the Phoenix web framework (of the Elixir ecosystem). It firmly guides you towards building applications where Phoenix is only a single interface to your underlying Elixir application, and the web layer, by design, doesn't contain business logic, but rather just gives you a web-friendly way to talk to the application itself. The community has come up with the mantra of "Phoenix is not your application" to drive this point home.
This approach and separation of concerns also means that building e.g. REST or GraphQL APIs on top of your application is simple, as your web framework has no say in how the data is actually structured or queried.
Are there any specific libraries or tools written in PHP that you use in your day-to-day life? Perhaps having a look into their state could yield some interesting opportunities for you to contribute. That way you'd also get an extra incentive to keep contributing, as you'd personally get to enjoy the results, too.
Thank you for the tool and the details you've shared! Is there any particular reason you opted to run your own instances of Lighthouse rather than use the PageSpeed Insights API provided by Google? API quota limitations, perhaps?
I watched the ElixirConf 2019 keynote [1] as soon as it came up. While I was left excited about Lumen in general, I wasn't entirely sure what kinds of things Lumen would be most useful for.
Being able to ship a single binary (like with Go or Rust) sounds handy, but shipping a tarball hasn't been that much of a challenge either. Being able to run BEAM code in the browser also sounds handy, but due to size issues I probably wouldn't want to ship the entire BEAM to my users either, right?
Can someone with a more thorough understanding of Lumen share some thoughts on this?