[ninjakeyboard]

I have experience with both. I have recently been working with Elixir. It's okay. I find the lack of static typing to be some thing I celebrate and curse. Elixir is VERY simple and beam is VERY slow at computation. I wouldn't recommend anyone working with scala/akka look at elixir unless you want to understand how BEAM works but I would recommend _everyone_ working with elixir learn different functional programming languages. Ultimately I'm much happier writing scala with akka. I get more done faster (except things like handling json sometimes because it's hard with types), can refactor the code more freely, and release less broken code to production.

[ninjakeyboard]

Also, I have to say that elixir developers are generally not very experienced with it and seem to be generally less desirable than the people who are working with scala. You get rubyists that have some interest in working with elixir because there were some blog posts saying it's the new hotness. Scala seems to attract more comp-sci savvy people. And generally those people will refuse to work with elixir when there are Scala job out there that will pay. Startups should use scala for these reasons. Elixir may be a mistake for the resource pool alone.

One thing that's trecherous is that rubyists can bring whatever they believe to be the right way to do things and assume everything should be exactly the same, especially with regards to ecto vs active record. Elixir isn't ruby. Ecto isn't rails active record. Not anywhere close. It just happens to look like ruby and there are some influences in the design but Ecto tells you not too implement STI like rails does for example so don't assume you're going to do it like you would in rails. I'd argue ruby is more like scala than it is like elixir as it has multiple paradigms. Elixir is squarely functional, just a very very simple functional language. The skill ceiling is pretty low and it should take very little time for someone to get up to speed which is important because you won't find a big pool of rockstars using it in the job market so you'll have to hire good people without experience and hope they will be okay using elixir and not jump ship to go work with strong typed languages.

[josevalim]

> Also, I have to say that elixir developers are generally not very experienced with it and seem to be generally less desirable than the people who are working with scala.

Scala has been around for 14 years and is built on top of a much more used VM compared to Elixir. Given Scala's growth, it is expected that Scala developers are more experienced as they have been around for longer. Scala also had more time to spread to comp-sci fields, especially as it is taught by many universities. All thanks to Scala's merits, of course!

So while I agree that experience is a factor, I wouldn't draw conclusions that those are intrinsic to Elixir or to its users. I also have heard of companies that had no trouble to hire Elixir developers (some have 80 Elixir devs and growing) and some that had many difficulties. As with any other technology, YMMV.

[StreamBright]

Scala/Akka has a much worse developer experience than Elixir/Phoenix. BEAM is fairly slow but you can make FFI calls into much faster implementations if your workload is CPU bound (most of the workloads I am familiar with in the web world are not).

Release less broken code to production? I am not sure about it either.