I've thought about this a lot, and I think that part of what hurts Erlang/Elixir adoption is the scale of the OTP. It brings a ton of fantastic tools, like supervision trees, process linking, ETS, application environments & config management, releases, and more. In some ways it's closer to adopting a new OS than a new programming language.

That's what I love about Elixir, but it means that selling it is more like convincing a developer who knows and uses CSV to switch to Postgres. There's a ton of advantages to storing data in a relational DB instead of flat files, but now you have to define a schema up front, deal with table and row locking, figure out that VACUUM thing, etc.

When you're just setting out to learn a new language, trying to understand a new OS on top hurts adoption.

I think most people tend to stick with what they learn first or hop to very similar languages. Schools generally taught Java and then more recently Python and JS, all of which are relatively similar.

Unless someone who knows those three languages is curious or encounters a particular problem that motivates them to explore, they're unlikely to pick up an immutable, functional language.

I think you’re right. I only picked up Elixir about 10 years ago after getting frustrated with Python’s GIL and Java’s cumbersomeness, and feeling that object oriented programming over complicates things and never lived up to its hype.

I have never looked back.

Elixir is an absolute joy to use. It simplifies multi-threaded programming, pattern-matching makes code easier to understand and maintain, and it is magnitudes faster to code in than Java. For me, Elixir’s version of functional programming provides the ease of development that OOP promised and failed to deliver.

In my opinion, Elixir is software engineering’s best kept secret.