Some examples of companies using Elixir / Erlang in production: Discord, WhatsApp, WeChat, Bet365, Pinterest (notification system). This is hardly "obscure" -

Some examples of companies using Elixir / Erlang in production: Discord, WhatsApp, WeChat, Bet365, Pinterest (notification system). This is hardly "obscure" - these are applications used by billions of users all over the world. Potential developer market for your business or OS project is a factor in engineering, sure. But it's certainly not the only one, and there's a utility threshold for how useful a large developer base can be - maybe I don't care that there are only 10,000 good Elixir in my region if I only need 3 or 4, and I can entice them with good conditions (salary, or a prestigious OS project) World-class CTOs and engineers choose Erlang and Elixir for their working characteristics as programming languages, a point which you've chosen to completely ignore. > Even worse, it's functional I wouldn't consider myself a functional programmer (although if a language offers FP facilities I often use the hell out of them over imperative and OO constructs) but if I built something in FP because I thought it was be the best-suited paradigm for the task at hand, I'd happily weed out people who can't be arsed to learn the rudiments.