So, disclaimer...haven't used it in full anger (i.e., bet my continuing payment of rent on it), but I think it's got some very good things going for it based on my hobby project.<p>First, the community support is awesome--every day that I'm in IRC I can get useful help from Chris, and that extends even to somewhat noobish mistakes. As the community grows, and we get more hotshot valley kids who just want a short exit and they've heard about this crazy Phoenix language, this might go away, but for now it's a great time to be in.<p>Second, the plug system is pretty much everything I liked from Express/Connect middleware. Very easy to setup pipelines and whatnot and setup that sort of layered functionality. Rails didn't do this in a way that I liked, nor did Sinatra--it's really something I didn't know I missed until I was doing Node development.<p>Third, UTF-8 is a first-class citizen in Elixir. This is something that was clunky and a little sad in Erlang.<p>Fourth, Websockets are a first-class citizen in Phoenix. No more of the hacky bullshit we've dealt with in other libraries (I'm looking at you, Event Machine).<p>~<p>At ElixirConf last year I think a few different companies were looking at switching over, most notably at least one game studio that wanted to use it on the backend (I could be misremembering, so don't hold me to that) for infrastructure stuff.<p>Personally, I really want to move my company's entire stack over to it barring some compute jobs, but that's a long road to hoe.