Can someone post/comment a more critical analysis of elixir if they can?

It's really hard to figure out how useful it is because people always build up hype when it's not always worth it. All I ever see is how wonderful and magical elixir is and how it's literally life changing. I want to believe but I've seen technologies with lots of hype that didn't live up to it. Plus elixir is different enough that I have a really hard time jumping into it to try it out.

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I'll also add that recently I had to build a backend for a long term project I've been working on. I seriously looked at elixir/phoenix, but from my research it didn't seem like the pros outweighed the cons. Like there are some technologies that are so useful they're worth the lack of a robust ecosystem or the steep learning curve that may be necessary. And I am not sure Elixir meets that criteria.

There's already existing technologies like python/ruby for fast development, java/groovy for stability and groovy for modern features, and finally golang which is really good for concurrency and building web related microservices. Golang in particular is nice because it solves issues like python's slowness and it's slimmer than java in many ways. And these solutions are already pretty good. It's not like it's all that hard to write a backend. Like the productivity gains from js to typescript are huge because js can be bad enough that there's a lot of room for improvement. Whereas how much faster and MORE productive can someone really be in elixir?

And I am not even going to get into functional programming which is a whole other beast. It requires significantly different style of thinking, making a lot of my experience less valuable, I don't think it solves solutions for an oop system that's well designed, and often times the implementation can be bad if the right tools aren't there. From my limited experience, FP provides some really powerful features, but at the builtin cost of being more rigid when I don't need it to be.

Here are a few legitimate complaints about Elixir (and in some cases, its host VM, the BEAM):

* No mutation support means that for some CPU-heavy tasks, it's not as performant as languages that allow mutation. Some optimized algorithms that rely on mutation can't be expressed directly in Elixir or Erlang, and instead need to be linked in through a foreign function interface.

* It's not on the JVM so we don't get to piggyback on the thousands of dev-years of VM optimization and ecosystem around it.

* It isn't invented at, supported at, and marketed by a FAANG-type company. Money moves mountains and Ericsson doesn't spend as much on Erlang/BEAM as, say, Google spends on Go.

* Comparison across types is not a runtime exception, so you need to guard against crap like `nil > 1 == true` yourself.

* Erlang standard library, which is idiomatic to use from Elixir in the same way of using Java classes from Clojure, is a bit of a junk drawer of tools. There's good stuff, but you may have to dig for it.

* Elixir still hasn't nailed the balance between creating small, independent pieces of code ("applications" in Erlang-speak) and wrangling them so they can be used as dependencies from monorepos, multi-repos, etc. Umbrella projects were an attempt, I don't like them.

* There is an impedance mismatch between Erlang/Elixir's configuration system and 12 Factor® ENV-style configs. (Full disclosure, I wrote a library for this: https://github.com/appcues/config_smuggler)

* The built-in Elixir code formatter removes trailing commas from multiline lists. I mean, come on!

Could you use a nif for the heavy compute tasks?