[davidw]

The short version:

* 'event driven' things like Node.js got popular because they use fewer resources to serve the same amount of data (generally). But for a lot of people, JS is not really their idea of a good time. Erlang (and Go) fill this niche pretty well.

* Elixir finally made Erlang more palatable to more people. Jose has done a superb job with it, because it's not just a nicer syntax, there is a bunch of nice stuff he's built into it. It doesn't hurt that as a former(?) member of the Rails core team, he has a deep understanding of web programming and its requirements.

* It is solid, solid tech. There's lots of new development happening on top of, say, Elixir, like Phoenix, but the underlying system is pretty hardened.