I love Elixir! One of the main reasons I haven’t been able to sell it as much was it’s lack of good numerical computational support, but with the release of nx now getting to a very mature point it’s really hard for me to not get excited about this ecosystem.

I also think that livebook has a couple of really killer features now that make anyone who spends a significant amount of their time in Jupyter notebooks to stop and take a second look (eg it’s so easy to share a livebook compared with sharing a jupyter notebook, or even easier to extract code from a livebook prototype to turn into a resilient production elixir module).

Yes there is still a ways to go to catch up to the maturity and breadth of the community that Python has in this domain, but that gap is closing way faster than I could have thought.

I think the biggest challenge for adoption is its functional nature. If you take the time to learn about elixir and the BEAM you are rewarded with a pretty complete runtime which ships with its own DB, in-memory Store and message queue (with a very easy path to adopting more battle tested versions of these when you outgrow what is included in OTP). This means spin up time prototyping new systems is spent less on vendor choices (which type of DB should I use) and more on solving your problem domain.

I wish I had know about all this stuff 5 years ago…