[hnedeotes]

I think it's sort of obvious what the parent comment is saying? You gave an example of your experience with a different language, that has really not much bearing on the one being talked about.

It runs in a different VM, it's a different paradigm (or mash-up of paradigms which, in turn, is the source of one of your contention points when learning/ramping hires), it's a statically typed language so requires usually more upfront thinking and a better understanding of domain modelling (getting it right from the start), it's notorious for being complex (don't know if it's warranted or not, but it's a normal complaint even from people who seem to like the language).

Elixir/Erlang does need a bit of honest study to hone (this is the same with everything though, JS for instance is quite complex when you take a step back and look at what you need to understand to write decent maintainable code), but the payoff is much higher because it doesn't change with every tide. Code you wrote 4 years ago, if idiomatic, will be idiomatic today, and I'll go off on a limb here and say it will be in 4 years time too.

(btw didn't downvote you)

[jklm]

To be fully clear - for how they align with the 3 points I raised, Ruby/Node/Python fit into 1 bucket (no, yes, no) and Scala/Elixir/Haskell fit into another (yes, no, yes).

I'm not trying to derail into discussing how Scala is a shade better or worse than Elixir in some aspect - the main point I'm trying to drive home is that they're both in an entirely different class compared to Ruby/Node/Python.