You will find examples from companies moving away from Elixir, Python, JavaScript, Scala, Java, etc. I don't think there is any programming language that is "unditchable". So I'd suggest to analyze the reasons that made a company move away from X, check if they are still relevant, if they'd apply to you, and, if yes, if they are a deal breaker or something you can work around.

For the Brex case, if I remember correctly, lack of static typing and early-development of gRPC tools were the reasons back then. How much this impacts your needs is up to you.

'I don't think there is any programming language that is "unditchable".'

There can not exist one perfect programming language for all uses. (Sometimes people don't like that statement but I think if you seriously sit down and work the math it's pretty obvious that, as a simple for instance, Rust is not going to replace all shell scripting and shell scripting is not going to replace all Rust, and that's just an example, the principle holds in numerous dimensions in the programming language space. [1])

There are always people making bad decisions, some of those bad decisions are about which programming language to adopt for a problem.

So, yes, you'll always be able to find companies dropping some language, but it isn't necessarily the language's "fault".

I don't say this on every such article in the comments because it's kinda kicking someone while they're down, but I would assess that the clear majority of the ever-present torrent of "We switched from X to Y and look how much better Y is!" are actually long and detailed explanations of how the company in question chose the wrong technology for their problem, not how bad X is. The two major exceptions are "our tech in X predates Y existing as a valid choice, and now that it does, it's a better choice" (can't blame them for existing before the right tech, I've made that move myself in my own career) and "We did our research and X really should have worked but we got into it only to discover that it really didn't for some reason we could not have reasonably anticipated". That latter is pretty rare, IMHO, but I've seen it a couple of times. (Generally it is when a closed-source stack has a fundamental problem and you can't fix it, because it's closed source.)

(I suppose there's also "X was a good choice initially but we outgrew it", but in my very opinionated opinion even these are often... dubious. It happens, yeah, but in my personal opinion it still means the language chosen was not able to scale the solution. Only people truly suprised by their growth, which does happen, should reach for this.)

[1]: And if that still bothers you, think small shell rather than large. I'm not going to write Rust for the equivalent of "awk '{ print $3 }' myfile | sort | gzip > sorted_names.gz". However broken shell legitimately is as a programming language, you simply can not argue with that kind of bang-for-the-buck.

Too bad, you're missing out. Did you look into companies that have not ditched it?

People don't tend to write articles titled, "We've been using the same tech for 10 years and have had no major issues with it so we are still using it." It's always the "we ditched x for y" ones that get traction and the actions of ONE company can seemingly have a far-reaching impression for people who otherwise know nothing about the technology in question.

Do you reject learning any language that has been migrated away from by any company? Why not make up your own mind about whether it is nice instead of depending on rumours about other companies?

In any case you could have easily googled "brex elixir" and have found their blog explaining their reasoning as the first result: https://medium.com/brexeng/building-backend-services-with-ko...

"Development speed: The future will be great and we want to get there fast. Our choice needs to help us move with urgency and focus. A type-system was a non-negotiable choice here."

While Jose Valim did a good job in his talk about dispelling the idea of type system offering all these promises that may or may not be true, the idea will never die. This could mean that it is the right idea, but it could also mean that now's the time to look into a way to offer it in away it attracts people who have that perception while offering a type system of value.

I hear new Cto came in, got nervous about hiring. They are still hiring for elixir positions, though?

i heard basically the same and also (the new CTO just really like kotlin and knew a bunch of people who know kotlin and wanted to bring them over. )

again, take the above with a grain of salt.