I think it's interesting that Rich seems to miss out on Erlang (and Elixir) entirely, even when he gets to talking about Situated Programs and Runtime Tangibility, not even to speak of Concurrency.
To be honest, what I really like about Elixir so far is the developer affordances: excellent REPL, super-fast startup time, and building on 30-ish years of OTP.
When Rich talked about Systems programming and Runtimes, I expected Erlang/Elixir to come up as obvious examples along with Smalltalk and Common Lisp.
I love Clojure, and really don't like the Elixir syntax (though I used to dislike the Clojure syntax, so...) Have you found Elixir's oddities (like calling lambdas in a different way than you call functions lambda.(:bar) vs func(:bar)) to be annoying?
- Calling lambdas with a dot is a real wart. I find it very easy to forget and it looks ugly.
- I also don't like the Rubyesque end keyword you have to provide for functions. Get's verbose. Whish Elixir was white space sensitive like Python, Haskell, Elm et al.
- Pattern matching in functions is an idiom that is overused. It easliy gets verbose since you have to type out the full function signature.
- A proliferation of data structures dictated by performance issues (lists vs. tupels, maps vs. keyword lists). Ugly map litteral: %{}. (Personal issue I guess, I tend to find $%& etc. ugly in a programming language. It's swearing at me!)
Apart from these gripes I like Elixir a lot. A clean and pretty simple language. Protocols are used in a nice way to acheive polymorphism (similar to Clojure, I think). Good as a first FP language. Gives you access to an interesting runtime.