> Many people that adore Elixir also think Ruby is a no go, despite the latter being a strong influence. Arguments against Elixir tend to revolve around its lack of traction, not its lack of seriousness.

Elixir is funny. I've done Elixir for years now, and did some Ruby at the beginning of my career. A ton of people come to Elixir for the familiarity of the Ruby-like syntax but with a functional programming basis. They like Ruby but get tired of OOP and mutable state and want to try something else. They tend to stay for the runtime/VM, called the BEAM.

Don't get me wrong, the Elixir language is nice, but the BEAM and its operational characteristics feel night-and-day compared to Ruby and most other languages that were designed for a world of single-threaded programming.

When you're using the BEAM (any language - there are a few now) there's this amazing sense that you're using something that was _designed to be operated_. You can instrument anything. You can trace anything. You can see the live state of anything. You can restart anything. It's a holistic _system_ for building systems, not just a language.

> When you're using the BEAM (any language - there are a few now) there's this amazing sense that you're using something that was _designed to be operated_. You can instrument anything. You can trace anything. You can see the live state of anything. You can restart anything. It's a holistic _system_ for building systems, not just a language.

Well said. Question for elixir fans or the haters, what's the perception re: current blockers for widespread adoption? Years ago, it was nothing more or less than third-party libs and frameworks. That must be better by now, or there's a short-list of what's missing?

Somewhat of a tangent, but TFA doesn't mention python and I would think for rubyists this is (still) the elephant in the room. It kind of won to the extent they target the same niches and same audiences, for better or worse. I know it's kinda naive, but I was really hoping elixir would get all of the ruby crowd excited, and they'd move the best parts that they can't live without into elixir. Why didn't they / don't they? Is it all about OOP? Or if rails is the killer app, would a rails "skin" for phoenix not go a long way towards scratching the itch?