[BadInformatics]

I do wonder if you'd see similar reactionary claims about Elixir being a general-purpose language if the community experienced constant shallow and misinformed claims to the contrary (which Julia has in abundance, for some reason). Imagine if every 10th post about Elixir on HN was "I will never use it because I work in embedded and it has zero support there" when Nerves is a google search away.

From another perspective, if we consider "general purpose" to mean "focuses on most of the things I care about", then you could argue (and I'd agree) that Elixir appears more general purpose for a larger number of people. Specifically, most devs work on networked services, and networked services are bread and butter for BEAM languages.

Lastly, there is also a strong tendency to dismiss anything with a whiff of academic attachment as unfit for "real" industry work. This effects not just Julia, but also Scala, OCaml, Haskell, TLA+, and more. Though I do empathize with the perspective, It is often taken to the point of caricature-you can show someone a dozen companies using some tech and it'll be as if you said nothing at all!