Agree with the sentiment behind a lot of the comments above. Elixir/Erlang are awesome and there is a lot of vitality in those communities at the moment (more in Elixir perhaps).

Elixir is definitely a darling of HN but there are some areas where there are some shortcomings in my point of view:

- A lot of people seem to love Elixir macros but I actually think that they result in a lot of compile time magic and make the code difficult to debug/read. Macros make code easy to write but supremely difficult to behind-the-scenes-understand and debug. The code that you write is transformed into something very different when you run it! Also every major Elixir library brings its own special macros which is a pain. Erlang OTOH does not use user defined code transformations (i.e. macros) so much so the code there is easier to comprehend. But the Erlang language is quite barebones and does not have the expressive power of some of its functional cousins like OCaml/ML/Haskell. Its seems that macros were an easy way to impart this expressive power to Elixir but it comes with the above mentioned costs.

- The Elixir (Erlang) runtime is stateful. This leads to many advantages but I kinda love the PHP model of every request is isolated/new from the rest of the system also. This may make PHP feel clunky/slowish but then its super easy to debug. PHP works out fine for _most_ systems even at scale. If your system does not have extreme requirements then PHP should work out fine.

- Elixir is not statically typed. In 2018 for a new project its hard to justify not using a typed system to make code more likely to "run" properly out of the gate or increase your confidence while refactoring it. Even a simple type system like golang's will do. No need for something complex like C++/Java/Rust etc.

In summary there is a lot of good in the Erlang/Elixir ecosystem. I think it makes sense to use this platform in many scenarios.

P.S. I've talked about PHP above. It continues to be fashionable to bash PHP and I feel this is a meme that must be combated. PHP 7.x is a much improved platform. Once you look past some of its historical warts you'll find that it can be very productive to work in. Of course it lacks static typing but if you specify the types of the your function parameters and (comment) annotate the type variables you can get some of the benefits of typing if you have the correct IDE/code analysis tools. (Elixir/Erlang also have "soft" static typing via dialyzer).