Almost 20 years after I bought my first Erlang books, I would never recommend Erlang OR Elixir to anyone but a senior dev who likes coding on their own and want to try something different. This pool is almost 0 people, since I was someone who wanted to play with it. I found the juice not worth the squeeze, in time investment vs capability. The build system alone is enough to throw most people off.

How is the build system a problem? It's a piece of cake to create a deployment and everything is controlled through the one cli, mix.

> It's a piece of cake to create a deployment and everything is controlled through the one cli, mix.

* It is not, despite your own familiarity. Erlang is in worse shape, using rebar3 ofc

* There is no central package management. I want to know what library to include that will do X (or a selection of choices), if it's not in https://github.com/h4cc/awesome-elixir, I basically have to crawl github. (Lua has the same problem).

Past some toy projects, most people abandon these languages for more mature ecosystems.

It's not like I don't ask about this and talk with other developers. 15 years later, the problems are largely the same as they were. It feels like these languages are stuck in echo chambers. shrug

Don't mix/confuse Erlang with Elixir - totally different kind of beasts, even if one is the child of the other.

In the corporate world ecosystem and fungibility of programmers are the top priority. The only way Elixir will get traction there is by Elixir companies literally growing to Fortune 500 size and showing the language/ecosystem is viable at that scale. Even then I doubt the advantages of Elixir will move the needle for that type of company because once you scale up the challenge is 99% people, teams, and communication; the elegance and efficiency of the code and ops don't matter much in those types of environments.

I'm always curious about C# because it seems to be fast, feature-full, not too much bloated, etc. I'm an elixir dev/fan, but what's wrong with C#? How would Elixir shine compared to it?

C# is great. You might like Blazor if you enjoy LiveView. I prefer .NET / C# static type system

Blazor is not surviving backend scaling, so currently it’s not really usable for bigger, real apps. Hopefully this will get fixed eventually.

I absolutely adore .NET for backend development. It's fast, and while C# might be a little syntactically verbose but that doesn't bother me, the language has made great strides over the years to reduce verbosity.

While I haven't used other ORMs in many moons, Microsoft's Entity Framework coupled with LINQ is soooooo freaking nice to use.

For frontend work, I'm still manually writing boring, vanilla JS, and it's honestly not bad for average CRUD apps. Though, I have been exploring various frontend libraries, and I haven't found one I absolutely adore yet. Hated Angular, React is tolerable (never tried Next.js), HTMX provided little over vanilla JS, and so on.

I have not tried Elixir, but in your opinion, what do you think makes it so great?

What is great with Elixir is that, it is so simple and non-bloated.

The BEAM (the Erlang/Elixir etc. VM) is a kind of operating system for the language, a kind of framework, that makes simple but profound choices.

The simplicity make it extremely powerful: everything is immutable, functional paradigm everywhere, everything is isolated in process and hierarchy of process, reliability is top-notch, async is best-in-class. This is the most logical, non-bloated and expressive language I have ever used.

On top of that, main libraries are awesome: Ecto (ORM and forms) is just awesome, Phoenix + Liveview is awesome, Req (for HTTP request) is great, Livebook (for prototyping) is great, etc. By the way, do you know that Ecto (made by José Valim himself IIRC) takes inspiration from LINQ? I'm doing "classic" web stuff, if those libraries weren't there in my case, I would not be using Elixir I don't have scale problem or else - I would love to dive into clustering etc. because it's also "battery-included". In fact, what makes Elixir great is the root choices and root libs, are great (powerful and simple).

The only problem I see: - lack of adoption which implies sometimes missing lib (but you can interface w/ other languages like rust or whatever) - lack of types make it prone to some bugs (typically atom - akin to keywords - comparison) and also editor inference is less powerful - but it is coming - tooling could be faster

But really: simplicity + expressivity

As a side note for me the problem I see w/ C#: mainly is because of Micro$oft (i have ethical concerns) and also "larger" in a more bloated to me (hard to beat Elixir). But otherwise it seems great

FP (Elixir) vs OOP (C#).

I used to develop in OOP (C++, C#, Java) for 15 years and I know what I am talking about: just try to read Elixir/Phoenix project and come back here with your impressions.

Sounds like you need to sell it better ;p