I wouldn't go as far as saying it's a "toy" for them, I know some engineers there and someone who joined recently who spent significant time learning Elixir before joining.
Real talk. HN posts on anything OTP continue to be the same echo chamber of responses, with most readers just leaving them to it. Many people have been trying to nicely point out that "uses Elixir in some places" is not the same as "built on Elixir". ie It's exceedingly rare for any system to have a secret sauce called Elixir and none of them have sparked a race to use it. How many decades before someone points out it's a dead horse?
From my few years off-and-on, Elixir is a nice syntax on top of Erlang. Erlang is intrinsically a flow-based system. Just because you can prove something is turing complete, doesn't make Elixir/Erlang a good general language choice. The no-side effect philosophy is a dead end. You just store state somewhere else anyway, so what have you gained? The current type system is problematic, at best, and everyone knows that. Decades have passed and the same tired phrasing appears in every paper and every talk. "dynamic, scalable language built on Erlang VM, designed for building maintainable, high-concurrency apps". It's clear that this isn't special anymore and it reads as desperate for relevancy, or left to rot. Either way, Elixir/Erlang is a specialty tool like Apache Nifi or CockroachDB. Niche, at best, a sub-optimal choice at worst, for most projects.
It's oft repeated that Elixir/Erlange tooling is "established". Whenever I have used the tooling or a framework (looking at you Phoenix), it's been primitive (Observer has gotten better), poorly implemented (IDEA, VScode), or requires a large amount of memorization to "learn" it. Not the language, the tooling. It's not enough to know Elixir or Erlang. You better understand BEAM (to some extent), shell scripting (just run it in a docker on windows), some glue technologies (something to build the UI, maintain state, etc), and then you can get down to building your backend application.
??? Erlang and Elixir have of tons of side effects. You must not either know the languages well—or maybe you mean immutability?
If you mean immutability, have fun building highly concurrent systems without it. The local reasoning and safety guarantees that immutability gives you makes building large scale applications sane—that’s the only way I’d want to program.
Thank you for posting this, it also sums up some of my feelings. I would also stress that the Windows story with Elixir/Erlang last I checked was quite miserable coming from .NET. It's not the easiest thing to just fire up and try out unless you are in the *nix world.
