What a terrific write up! I highly recommend the read.

I too had an ephiphany when I realized Elixir was actually a Lisp. The language went from mildly interesting to "holy crap I think this could be my favorite language." Add on some wildly productive and pragmatic frameworks like Phoenix, Nerves, and increasingly Nx, and you've got a hell of a toolkit.

My biggest criticism of Elixir has been the difficulty of writing quick scripts, but that story has improved greatly over the last couple of years. I still turn to Ruby for scripts (especially since it's often present on systems and so easy to install), but this is a good reminder that it's time to try Elixir again for that. In some ways it may be better, such as dealing with dependencies. For exmaple I try hard to avoid using any non-standard libs with Ruby scripts so I can just use the system ruby, and don't have to ship a Gemfile and/or install any gems, or mess with chruby/asdf. With Elixir that story looks even better since the deps can be part of the script itself.

Here's a great repo showcasing how to use it more like a quick scripting language. https://github.com/wojtekmach/mix_install_examples