[sbuttgereit]

If you're going to try and use this analogy, you need to compare Elixir to Kotlin or Scala or Clojure rather than Java. Elixir is a language written for the BEAM which was created for Erlang. The BEAM happened to be useful VM for these other languages such as Elixir, Gleam, LFE, & Luerl.

[7bit]

No, I don't. I'm not writing gleam etc for the same reasons.

[dematz]

If you don't want to then fair enough :) that said if your problem is just installation, some of the gleam people realized it can be tricky and made a nice guide for various operating systems and package managers: https://gleam.run/install/

Note this includes installing erlang as well

While it is multiple steps, the frustration is a much more one time thing compared to the problems and frustrations you'd have using a language or its ecosystem for a long time or big project