Signals
Admired ≠ adopted
Relative scores (0–5) inspired by Stack Overflow-style admiration vs usage. Not a ranking of merit — a map of gravity vs love.
96 techs with scores · top-left = admired niche · bottom-right = enterprise gravity without love
Loved niches
High admiration, low adoption — the hidden-gem quadrant.
Language · 2011–now
Elixir
BEAM reliability with modern syntax. Phoenix and LiveView keep the torch for pragmatic functional web.
Language · 1958–now
Lisp
Parentheses, macros, and AI winters. The language academics admire and enterprises politely ignore — until a dialect sneaks into their editor.
Language · 1990–now
Haskell
Pure functional, lazy by default, and the language that makes conference talks deep and hiring pipelines empty.
Language · 2015–now
Rust
Memory safety without GC pauses. Climbing from systems niches into cloud infra and WASM.
Language · 2016–now
Zig
C without the footguns — in theory. A systems language beloved in blog posts; its flagship production user rewrote itself in Rust.
Language · 2019–now
Gleam
Erlang semantics with friendly syntax on the BEAM. The language your functional meetup loves and your employer has never heard of.