[j4pe]

Is it a bit of extra complexity? Yes.

Does it cause friction for new devs? No - I can't think of any mainstream Elixir use cases that require Erlang libraries, with the exception of math operators like `:math.sqrt/1`. Chris' comment here is the golden example of this.

And anyway, what does the user get in exchange for that extra layer of complexity? A unique high-concurrency VM with easy-to-use primitives that would require huge gobs of code and lots of added dependencies in other languages.

It's a small tradeoff. My own experience is that the benefits far outweigh the complexity cost.

It sounds like OP mostly objects to the oldschool textfile documentation aesthetic of a lot of Erlang core and libraries, which is fine, but the overwhelming majority of new Elixir devs doing web applications and data processing will never encounter this.

[weatherlite]

> A unique high-concurrency VM with easy-to-use primitives that would require huge gobs of code and lots of added dependencies in other languages.

Truth is most web devs don't care about concurrency - it's a thing left for the ops team and with today's tools (k8s) its getting more and more trivial by the minute and it's only gonna get simpler and cheaper.

I'm not saying there aren't any use cases for Elixir, I'm just saying they're not that obvious or common.