[tuxcall]

It sounds like the parsing you needed would not need to be generalized, as you were working on projects for which you knew the requirements. In this case, writing the custom parsers should have been a simple task, and not something that would have stopped or even deterred me from using a language. Frankly, in general, writing a JSON, or even an XML parser, is not challenging and should take little time.

These days there's a multitude of both XML and JSON libs for Elixir.