Is Elixir popular among Ruby fans or Rails fans? I really like ruby, kinda hate rails, and did not enjoy my one experience working in an Elixir codebase and haven’t managed to figure out why it keeps getting likened to Ruby.
23 year Rubyist here (and programming polyglot; I’ve shipped in 35+ languages or language dialects) who uses both Ruby and Elixir regularly.
I prefer to avoid Rails (it’s not bad, but it’s overkill for most things I need). The Elixir language has some superficial resemblance to Ruby which helped with language acquisition 8 years ago or so, but it is very much its own thing. The resemblance is unsurprising given José Valim's background with Ruby and Rails itself.
Most of my quick scripts end up being Ruby, but I prefer to think in Elixir (mostly for pattern matching) or Typescript (for structural typing). The libraries I maintain in the Ruby community support much older EOL versions of Ruby, so I haven't been able to adopt new syntax like pattern matching for much.
I used Elixir for a few years in a Phoenix project, after and before many Rails projects and in parallel with a couple of Django ones. There are things I really like about Elixir and I wish I had them in Ruby. I never thought about using Elixir for everyday scripting, I'm using bash or Ruby for that, sometimes Python. Elixir is a big projects language for me, much like Java. Too much boilerplate for tiny things. Phoenix vs Rails, even level. Both trump Django from very far above.
