Elixir is not the best. At anything.

I find Elixir to be pretty much the best overall but it is not the most/best/fastest in anything. It is exceptional in how much space it covers, how well it does it and how many workloads it performs awesomely for. It is fast in some sense, definitely not the fastest. It is productive and ergonomic but Rails, Django and possibly Laravel give you more for free, out of the box (and damn the consequences). Go beats us in raw performance and has a similar concurrency/parallelism story, if you squint. It is not the purest functional programming language. It is not the most dynamic. It is not the most static or deterministic.

This is infuriating for marketing. We have to show and tell because we can't just say "the fastest at X" because the story is more nuanced. You can build a more perfect system in Rust. Assuming you ever finish. You can possibly build a prototype faster with all the ready-to-use stuff in Next.js or whatever is relevant currently, it will churn and writhe like no-ones business and it will be a worse production experience. It builds prototypes that ship well and are maintainable. It is fast in most of the ways that matter for services. It eliminates a lot of extra stuff that you need on day two of the system.

Trying to explain get greatest parts of Elixir requires diving into what the runtime and BEAM VM offers and that mostly requires touching on Erlang. Explaining that this is tried and true with a roughly 40 year story and that Elixir provides the modern approach for it. You are asking for a lot of patience during that elevator pitch.

Now developers tend to love or respect Elixir whether they use it or not. And over time they build a more and more full understanding. There is a lot of nuance to why Elixir is great. There are a lot of careful compromises and design choices in there. There is the governance, ecosystem and community. If you've ever built characters in games, you might know the term glass cannon. When you focus fully on damage and save nothing for defense. It is very common to target extremes. Elixir does not do that. It is performant in many important ways, it is resilient in many important ways, it is productive and ergonomic in many important ways. It is not any of those things in all ways or to the nth degree.

It makes a mess of the message. But we build software for humans and humans are messy. I guess it takes a nuanced language willing to compromise to achieve good, not perfect, outcomes to provide nuanced, good, not perfect, solutions to problems.

You can reach me here on email, on Hachyderm where I'm @lawik@hachyderm.io, on Bluesky or by responding to this email to lars@underjord.io.

Thank you for reading. I appreciate you.

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