I'm really intrigued by Elixir/Erlang and would love to learn more about it. The problem (and this isn't a criticism of the language at all) is that I just can't figure out what I would use it for. Currently I'm mostly working on webapps, and although I have control over the technology I use I'm not sure I can justify using Elixir in my projects.<p>I'm working mostly with rapidly-changing MVPs, and the ability Rails gives me to iterate quickly is valuable to me. If I understand the Erlang value proposition, it's really meant for sending and dealing with millions or billions of messages in a distributed, fault-tolerant way. But since I'm nowhere near that scale (if my MVP can handle 5 concurrent users that's typically good enough to start with), I feel like switching to a language with less of an ecosystem would be almost all downside, even if the resulting code would be more scaleable. I'd love it if someone tells me that I'm wrong.
I've been looking at Elixir more and more over the last few weeks since it seems to incorporate many of the things I find lacking in Python. So far the only real hurdle was that I found the introduction text a little obtuse when it came to Mix and OTP (I'm often slow to get through introductory guides, since I'm a learn-by-doing person).<p>Would love to hear from other people who have come from a JavaScript / Python heavy background what their experience has been with the language. Or from people who do web development in general if they feel its a good fit.
I'm really excited about Exilir because it makes creating DSL like the Phoenix Web Framework, trivial.<p>However, I am concerned though that developing in Erlang is a paradigm shift for most developers (eg letting apps crash when unexpected behavior occurs, concurrency model, etc) and Exilir makes it too easy to think you're developing in a procedural language when you're not.<p>I wonder if I'm alone with this concern. One thing simply the Erlang syntax does well is re-enforce the idea of how to fundamentally change how to develop applications to fit its model yet Exilir hides all of that<p>Edit: typo