Because embarrassing little in coding is controlled by these imagineers. There’s no much real difference in programming languages anymore, honestly I’ve never met a good programmer that cared about these, it makes your code fringe and inportable.
Having a language that generates proper errors, does not try to hold your hand incorrectly and instead tells you you are wrong is always better.
Haskell is one of the best in the world in this. But it also happens to be incredibly complex and also weird in it's syntax, to the point it does make code fringe and unreadable.
There is a real difference here - a language that can help you fact check your logic and reason that you are accessing a potentially null value in this context can be better if it's drawbacks don't outweight it.
Elixir isn't static so it doesn't do this but it does blow up a lot compared to other dynamic languages. It's abstraction of proccesses and threads and what not, does actually make your code more portable and more modifyable. It offers a specific paradigm for programming that works great for multiple proccesses and the whole language is built around it. So if you are going to be using that paradigm anyway it would be a better choice.
I do not write Elixir/Erlang programmers. But I do think that the actor model and BEAM solve a few issues that I face when writing complex backends, which I do.
For example I have not found a language whose error handling I like - Go and Rust are super meticulous, for example and you get error handling code everywhere, which is good for stability but not great for developer experience. TS/JS/Node suffers from the opposite - error handling is an afterthought and you never know what exception will come at you and from where and bomb you whole server, so you end up relying on cloud solutions running large redundant arrays of processes. Isolation of errors within a process and message passing is a great abstraction.
Another thing is that I get to spend a lot of time on is setting up Redis/Cloud stuff to do basic queue, caching and cron. That stuff takes up time, increases complexity, creates new sources of error and grows institutional knowledge. Using a system which has those built into the language is a major improvement. Vercel/Deno/Bun/etc are solving some of the above by including them in their cloud offerings with relatively good DX, but it still increases complexity, takes you out of code and locks you in with the vendors.
I have trauma from being forced to write things down because I had a progressively worsening tremor in my childhood. It doesn’t sound that bad and truely it wasn’t the worst trauma someone can experience, but I still have a very physical reaction to being made to fill out forms quickly where my hands shake wildly. It makes me wonder if trauma just doesn’t respect the intensity of the experience and it’s more of result of how we form memories, I definitely know people who’ve had more difficult lives who don’t have this.
