I've just started messing with elixir. It's a functional language that runs on the Erlang VM but it's syntax is ruby-ish.

I'm a newbie but I've been impressed by the tooling so far. And once you change how you think about everything the learning curve isn't too bad. =)

It has a rails-y framework that I haven't heard much about (and nothing particularly bad):

https://github.com/phoenixframework/phoenix

Some people would say "Python", since the tooling for Python is generally excellent, but I don't have enough experience with Python web stacks to say that they're better or worse than Rails. There's certainly less "magic" with Python, but I'd argue that's a good thing.

I think all the criticism from that article applies to Python as well.

Not all of them. Python is often stricter in some aspects of the language and in community norms.

Someone can correct me if I'm wrong but the module namespacing helps mitigate this complaint via Twitter:

> Can't figure out how a simple thing works in a codebase with a zillion tiny objects and a billion levels of indirection?

i.e. unless you've gone out of your way to be too clever - you usually know where things in the current namespace came from.

Give Pharo a try, I think you'd be pleasantly surprised.