Oh, he definitely tried R but was not very impressed. Says it's only moderately better than Python's otherwise excellent bindings to a lot of libraries, and that he had no patience for Julia. He isn't exactly a programmer, he's just a very practical guy that is open to learning some programming to get his stuff done quicker and with less mistakes but that's about it. He has a short fuse for ecosystem deficiencies -- tbf I think we the programmers have to learn from such people. :D

And yeah, Elixir's scene in this area is just now starting. The NX project opened a lot of possible doors but the community just started stepping up. It's going to be a while, granted, but I am optimistic because Elixir's overall community values quality and centralization (with all the sometimes problematic collaboration efforts that entails) over rushing to have 10 competing implementations.

Time will tell. I have no horse in the race either way, just sharing various observations really.

As an R user who can't stand working in Python, where Elixir I think has the most potential is not the data science part but data engineering. The whole world of ELT/ETL pipeline and workflow tools written in Python is a mess IMO, and Broadway/Flow + Ecto + what's going on with Explorer etc I think can quickly replace a whole mess of python/scala/EMR type workflows in a language and environment that feels way better suited to the problem space, in my experience.

of course they do, R much more than Julia tbh, I think on the prototyping side of the venture Elixir experience is more polished, even though slower ( Nx IMO is promising in that space)