So I'd guess the code would end up looking similar on a lot of teams
You can know enough to get going quickly, but there's a healthy layer of power that will only come with time.
I should mention there is no problem not going there. I respect my teammates. Ruby/Rails is a great way to get things done. I would 100% use it as my MVP lang.
It's not object oriented, it's a functional language. It is polymorphic and all data is immutable. (Edit: actually realised its very much not like ruby, when I re-read this)
What I've seen in most projects is that the awesomeness that is threading (tasks and processes) is not really used. Supervisors aren't built as first class citizens.
I see teams eat the cost of NIH, but not get the benefits of crash fast, crash often.
So yes it does end up looking/smelling like ruby/rails but it really really shouldn't.
“A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing.”
I work with a pile of rails devs writing code in elixir. In that I mean you can feel the rails in their code. It "tastes" like rails. A few python devs also write python with elixir syntax.
Finding people who know the language is hard. Finding people who are willing to risk their time on the language is also hard.
By risk. If I spend 2 years writing Elixir and then go looking for a job I'm looking at getting a job with a language that's not popular. So my pool of place that will even look at me is smaller. Hiring managers/gate keepers might not see..
After 12 years of c++ I got a job where I needed to code in Delphi-Script for a year. When I told recruiters what I'd been doing I got "Oh.... Okay um... We'll call you."
I switched to rails for 6 months (same job) and recruiters were calling me non-stop. Working in low popularity langs limits my options. (even if they are great langs)
I'd say picking a language that's not yet popular limits your pool not just to the can-do's, but also to the can get my next job with this on my CV.