Just to add an additional anecdote/perspective for other folks curious about the Erlang mention: the lack of client support in Erlang/Elixir is real, unfortunat

Just to add an additional anecdote/perspective for other folks curious about the Erlang mention: the lack of client support in Erlang/Elixir is real, unfortunately. Just an artifact of it being a smaller ecosystem, but it's improving all the time. You can do mutable state manipulation in Erlang/Elixir through a few mechanisms - ETS tables is the main one - but it's not "high-speed" in the sense you find in C/Java/Rust/etc., where you want to bash on a slice of mutable, contiguous memory containing primitive (word sized/aligned) values. It's also a bit awkward, as ETS tables are more like having Redis inside your application than they are an actual collection type. Regarding string manipulation, strings in Elixir are actually quite good. This is one of Erlang's sore spots that Elixir improved upon. I'd put Elixir's string manipulation facilities up against anything I've used, including Java and Clojure. And +1 to the point about Erlang's concurrency story. If you have a highly concurrent problem, Erlang/Elixir really is best in class. It isn't a perfect technology by any means but it really is as good as everyone says it is.