So I switched from Python to Elixir for web backend stuff, but I also have experience with other functional languages like Scala, Clojure, Haskell. I've recent

So I switched from Python to Elixir for web backend stuff, but I also have experience with other functional languages like Scala, Clojure, Haskell. I've recently been learning Swift. I really like Elixir overall, these are the parts that I find frustrating. 1) Erlang's (and by extension Elixir's) persistent data structures are great but there are times when (for performance reasons) they're completely unusable and you have to resort to things like using ETS or spawning a process for each value you want to store. There are times when I would kill for something like Clojure's transients. 2) The syntax has some weird edge cases, particularly around first-class functions. For example, having to call closures as "closure.(arg1, arg2)" rather than "closure(arg1, arg2)" or having to (seemingly) immediately invoke a lambda to make it fit in a pipeline like "7 |> (&(&1 * 2).())". I know WHY those two bits of ugliness exist but it doesn't really make me any happier about them. 3) The BEAM VM is very much a world of its own, with limited and well-defined entrance/exit points. It's very easy to do anything in Erlang/Elixir that stays inside the VM or communicates via network socket. It's difficult to do things that interact with the host OS or native processes, things that would be trivial in Perl/Ruby/Python. The reason why none of these are deal-breakers is that I understand that they're the result of tradeoffs, not poor engineering. It would be easy to design a new language that has none of the above problems but it wouldn't have the massive benefits that the BEAM VM gives Erlang and Elixir.