As an outsider, a non-Ruby-user, I find it strange that Ruby users seem to be migrating to languages that are similar only in syntax but vastly different in nearly every other imaginable way.

Do Ruby users care only about syntax?

Maybe I'm not so different? Maybe my preference for ALGOL syntax just gives me more language options?

It's a "get hooked with the syntax, stay for the features" situation. Elixir leverages the incredible robustness of the erlang virtual machine. So much so, that for me, anyways, it's hard to imagine using anything else without losing sleep anymore.

i've read a lot about erlang vm, but i'm curious which feature makes it hard for you to imagine using something else, in practice. What are the things that saved you, in your experience.

I replaced a python/uwsgi stateless stack with an elixir stateful system. Flipped it over and it worked flawlessly, and hasn't died once in several months of operation. Latencies are way down, and operation of it is simpler. Full deploy to the head node is one command, not an ansible script.

I guess part of it is that I'm lazy and haven't learned supervisor strategies like kubernetes (the place I work doesn't deploy kubernetes anyways)

This video is instrumental in giving me the confidence to do what I did: https://youtu.be/JvBT4XBdoUE

Actually it's more than just syntax, elixir and crystal borrow a lot of ruby's stdlib api design, which in my opinion is way more pleasant than other languages'.