[lliamander]

I can't imagine scripting in Erlang. Or rather, I've seen it done and it wouldn't be my first choice.

Elixir, on the other hand, has many nice features for scripting, such as better string handling, process pipe-lining, and an excellent set of first-class generic data structures (beyond just map and list). It also happens to have Erlang's fantastic concurrency model.

[dnautics]

As a testament to this statement I wrote a Google maps API scraper to get a list of driving distances from a pair of csv tables - shortname + address and shortnames to and from, in about 1 hour, and the whole thing clocked in at 90 lines of code including about 40 lines of comments.

[7thaccount]

That seems about right for a competent Python coder. It or Powershell or Linux command line tools would have very little code and be very easy to whip something up. Perl would be great here as well or honestly any dynamic language with great library support.

[cutler]

Elixir still has to borrow arrays from Erlang and it's a pretty ugly implementation at that so no - I would not agree that Elixir has an excellent set of first-class generic data structures.

[bitwalker]

Neither Elixir or Erlang have real arrays, unless you want to count tuples. That said, I don’t see how that correlates to scripting, the data structures that are first class in Elixir are very ergonomic and certainly flexible enough to tackle pretty much any task you’d use a scripting language for.