While I do agree there should be less "activation energy" for the newbies to enter the Erlang community (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Djv4C9H9yz4), I don't think "identify ways to expand the scope of Erlang and Elixir to other potential use cases" is the way to go. Each language has its strength and weakness, being highly concurrent and fault-concurrent is the design goal of erlang/elixir, and erlang/elixir achieves that. Making them a general-purpose language seems a bad idea to me (think message-passing a large size of message in a non-concurrent situation where the shared-memory should be used. it just deteriorate the performance of the general-purpose program). Being able to built a great concurrent system is enough to make a language become popular in industry, the problem is really not about more use cases, but is how to make the barrier of entry lower. Also, it does matter to have a warming community, like most of Ruby communities I know.