If you're doing development with a web socket layer, it's entirely worth it to try out Phoenix Channels before you commit to another stack. It makes your life so much easier.
There are a lot of other great reasons to use Elixir though.
Phoenix Channels feels like cheating because it's just so intuitive and you get so much performance straight out of the box. It's obscene! Maybe I'm used to Ruby perf that this blew me away so much.
On free tier heroku dyno and the $7 postgres hobby dev, performance was around 27,000 messages sent per second before POSTGRES started complaining. It wasn't even the app itself that was complaining, it was postgres. This was sent via websocket using phoenix channels and persisted to the database.
If you're a backend guy, add this tool to your repertoire - you'll become a wizard and just have tighter code with less headaches.
The reason Elixir pulls people from Ruby is the language and community emphasis on developer productivity IMO.
It’s the one thing that Ruby excels at so well it justifies using Ruby in the face of plenty of other “fast” options. Dev time and time to market are still infinitely more important than hosting costs unless you are already at scale.
What Elixir brings to the table is the productivity and time to market with an architecture that scales for most every scenario experienced in server side dev aside from heavy math. And that architecture is designed in a way that makes maintainability a first class citizen because of the lack of long term dependency entanglement growth.
> and not second rate Ruby on Rails refugees looking for a faster Rails
That's pretty harsh, and not at all true in my experience. There's a growing community and I had no trouble hiring two remote people. I ended up with a lot of qualified candidates.
Moreover, a lot of great people came over from Rails. Jose and Chris McCord were both formerly Rails people.
I've met a lot of extremely talented Elixir devs, and Elixir enthusiasts who're eager to work with the language full-time. You're actually in a really good position if you're looking to hire Elixir devs, because there's more excitement around the language than open jobs for it.
That's why I love Phoenix Context's that were introduced in 1.3 - it allows you to really structure your code and not just throw everything in a "model" like in Rails.
There are a lot of other great reasons to use Elixir though.