Scala, where code you've written 6 months ago really does look like hieroglyphics to you or to anyone else right now who doesn't know Scala intimately ;)
I would agree that the Elixir community is currently very homogeneous and therefore very pleasant. To some extent, that is true of many new langs and their early communities. I disagree that this is a premature strike against it. I say enjoy it (and work within it) while it lasts, if you can.
Not sure why the wink is there :-) but the Scala codebase I'm working on is 3 years old already and it is the cleanest codebase I've ever worked with. Maybe my experience is not representative of the whole ecosystem, I have certainly seen really messy Scala codebases in my ~5 years of experience with it, just like I have seen for other languages too.
However Scala is the perfect example for my opinion though - people perceive it as a TIMTOWTDI language, but that's because it got an influx of developers from other communities, the most representative IMO being Java, Ruby, Erlang and Haskell. After all, a determined Java/Ruby/Erlang/Haskell developer can continue to program Java/Ruby/Erlang/Haskell in any language, especially if that language is expressive enough to allow it.
Having such an influx gave rise to different opinions and mentalities of how to do things. Speaking of the web crowd, there's a big difference between Scalatra (see scalatra.org) which appeals to a Ruby crowd and relies on un-typed and unsafe APIs with baked in mutation, versus Http4s or Finch, which are very FP and typeful, versus Play Framework which takes a more balanced approach, being like a Rails framework (including the kitchen sink), but with sanity and types.
And the Scala community is actually on a convergence path right now, due to better books, tools and libraries. Which for me actually doesn't matter that much, because in Scala I can rely on the compiler such that my code is not so dependent on learning and applying best practices, when compared with other languages.
I was NOT saying that Elixir is pleasant because it is unpopular. I am saying that this might be a factor, that I suspect that in such instances the social aspect plays a larger role than we give it credit, especially when dynamic typing is involved, because with dynamic typing you rely on agreed upon best practices that the community must push forward, much more than static language proponents need to do. And personally I think that a language's technical merits should be judged after it gets popular enough to see an influx of developers with strong opinions from other languages.
E.g. in a static language a Maybe/Option value forces you to deal with the possibility of a value missing, whether you want to or not, being also useful as documentation that's always up to date. Whereas in a dynamic language you have to rely on documentation (poorly updated because it's the last thing that people update), soft community rules, taboos, etc in order to do the right thing.
I would agree that the Elixir community is currently very homogeneous and therefore very pleasant. To some extent, that is true of many new langs and their early communities. I disagree that this is a premature strike against it. I say enjoy it (and work within it) while it lasts, if you can.