Comment by princevegeta89

I have a very extensive experience with both Ruby on Rails and Elixir/Phoenix. Also ended up building large full-stack apps on either framework.

In the beginning when Ruby on Rails said hello to me, I instantly fell in love with it and the simplicity and the natural semantics that flow with it. It was absurdly easy to write new features and ship them to production. As the codebase grew and the team grew we started running into situations where APIs broke, or to trace the workflow of things in terms of finding where methods came from, finding parent modules of modules, and finding their parents, configuration, and I started to note a general lack of IDE autocomplete and type-safety.

Then after a few years I jumped ship to Elixir and if felt like a breath of clean air when I had to learn FP. Everything was simple enough to understand. Performance knocks Elixir, Node, Python and any other interpreted stack out of the water. The Phoenix framework was, and is said to be thoughtfully designed and although there was no IDE support, we still had Elixir LS which was great enough to provide realtime guidance, linting and type safety during compile time. I was able to ship a very large app into production and it was bulletproof. The problem with Elixir was our other engineers struggled to shift away from Node, or any other stacks they already knew. They found the entire FP world to be weird. Hell, I found it weird too at times. Simple mutations of maps and arrays, that would be trivial in Ruby ended up being so complex in Elixir. In the end it felt like my team was not on the same page. I guess Elixir would be great if you ran a 3-person team or something, but since we were not, we got back to Ruby. In today's world though, I am largely looking at Go, for a backend system. IDE support is up there with Java, and the ecosystem is old and mature enough to find any package that you look for. Performance is C-like and learning curve is lean.

Just my 2c with all these platforms.