I've been using Elixir for three years in a production setting with a small team of engineers. I still love the language, the community, and everything it has t

I've been using Elixir for three years in a production setting with a small team of engineers. I still love the language, the community, and everything it has taught me as an engineer. However, there are real downsides to moving forward with Elixir: - If your engineers are used to the Ruby, JS, Python etc. ecosystems of finding a library for everything, they may become frustrated with the smaller Elixir ecosystem. In my experience, this is actually fine because it means you have fewer external dependencies to wrangle. - Differences between compile-time and run-time configuration is a foot gun. We ended up moving almost everything to run-time configuration, which is not what you see recommended by many libraries and examples. This is slowly changing however. - Deployment is a bit unique, and working with building releases can be confusing for those used to deploying dynamic languages that are not compiled. - Functional programming requires unlearning many OOP best practices. This can slow down engineers new to the language. A lot of these issues IMO comes from how Elixir was initially marketed as a "fast Ruby" and Phoneix "fast Rails". Once you get past the syntactical similarities you realize the semantics are very, very different. Elixir is much closer to Erlang and Clojure than it is to Ruby. Elixir is an excellent language for motivated engineers solving novel problems. If you are building a standard CRUD app, I think you will find more success with Rails or Django in 2020.