[lobster_johnson]

My impression is that Erlang/Elixir is excellent at the kind of decentralized networked services that people usually use it for, but less ideal for many other things. What's your experience with Erlang as a "day to day" language for more mundane stuff?

For example, a lot of my work tends to revolve around working with data. Processing large batches of data, parsing (often it comes in the shape of XML), transforming, filtering, ingesting it into databases, and so on. I can do this easily in Ruby, but performance issues has driven me to use Node.js or Go for new projects. With Go it's ridiculously easy to build efficient pipes that can parallelize each step to my liking, backpressure included. It's also trivial to build small command-line tools as well as specialized daemons. I have a world of libraries (and bindings to C libraries) at my disposal: AWS, image processing, transcoding, PostgreSQL, XML, JSON, it's all there. Go is also decent at Unicode and string manipulation.

I'm not wild about Go's performance, and everything I have seen of Erlang indicates that its performance is closer to that of Ruby or Node.js. Any comments here? Whenever I need to fire up anything related to batch processing in Ruby or Node.js, things take forever. Erlang's advantage here might be that it's easier to spawn remote processes to parallelize the workload.