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Ruby is definitely great and I would have totally agreed a couple years ago, but Elixir has blown my mind. It feels so much like LISP sometimes I wonder, especially with the full macro system where you can operate directly on the AST :-D

Given the recent news on Nx and Livebook, Elixir may be a first-class language for ML very soon.

On a related note, Elixir feels a bit like a functional love child of ruby and python.

Can you write general purpose scripts in Elixir like in Ruby or Python?

Yup, you can write standalone Elixir scripts. Running "elixir myscript.exs" gives you that.

And with Mix.install/2 [0] you have access to the entire ecosystem.

Here are a few examples: https://github.com/wojtekmach/mix_install_examples

[0]: https://hexdocs.pm/mix/1.12.3/Mix.html#install/2

If you’re in data science related fields python is kind of a must. Ruby has most of the same libraries but not all of them.

Plus at a certain point the people you have to deal with only know python.

Ruby was my main language from 2002 to about 2005. I ended up migrating back to Common Lisp.