To preface, I share a lot of the same sentiments as the author. My Elixir was Scala - learned it inside and out, then picked up Akka which taught me a lot of neat Erlang-derived principles. My favorite quote is "Make it work, make it right, make it fast," which is very close to the Armstrong comic.
Having said that, I would not recommend Elixir or Scala or anything similar for startups. The 3 main reasons:
1) It's a hiring problem.
There aren't enough qualified people who can fill these roles. Expect a lot of on-the-job training that's more challenging than you'd think since these languages/frameworks are different paradigms. Famously, the complaint I heard in Scala circles was "There are too many ways to shoot yourself in the foot." I worked at a well-known everyday consumer tech company where the payments platform went down for the better part of a day as people scrambled to figure out what went wrong. Noone had read the de-facto Scala bible which warned that catching `Throwable` could break your code.[1]
2) You really, really don't need to get things perfectly right from the get-go.
> My hot take about most dynamic languages is that they are a poor fit for startups who have intentions of being long-term businesses: you’ve created an environment that’s optimized for your founding engineers to build something quickly in the first 7 months, but the price is a set of recurring obstacles which your engineers will pay down over the next 7 years.
With rare exceptions, most companies throw away or rewrite their initial infra once they hit scaling issues. Having these scaling issues means you've likely hit product-market fit, secured more funding, and hired a badass team to solve said scaling issues.
3) The ecosystem is smaller.
Because the language/framework is deeper, it requires more investment to learn. In turn, fewer production-level libraries get built on top of it. That's when you end up needing to build a lot of things yourself. At which point - you've slowed down _even more_ vs. DynamicLang where you can run `dynamic-package add audit-trail` or something and get the 80/20 solution in 5 minutes.
[1] http://www.tzavellas.com/techblog/2010/09/20/catching-throwa...
I'd not recommend Scala for other reasons: being multi paradigm makes it hard to learn, read, re-read and collaborate on. Kotlin would be a more sensible choice on the JVM imho (no implicit nulls, fully OO at the core with FP where it makes sense in that context, sum-types, exhaustiveness checks, no exception/annotation frenzy like Java).
And Erlang misses types. Gleam[1] looks cool, and seems to be picking up steam.
Rust is an amazing choice if you need that kind of low-level control over performance in all it's dimensions (except built times).