The problem with Elixir is that it is such a foreign language to most of the junior developers and a radical shift to dig into coming from object-oriented and other higher-level languages. This is worsened by the fact that there are not many jobs for Elixir in addition to Development Tooling, IDE Support.
To someone who starts their job on an Elixir codebase, it is just not a smooth onboarding at all. While the performance aspect is unparalleled compared to most of the popular scripting languages in the last decade, the price to pay to settle into Elixir seems huge to me.
sounds like a feature not a bug. Poor onboarding is a cultural problem in my experience, not really a technology one.
When you get junior (or even non junior) developers onboarded in a new language, you have a unique opportunity to break them of bad habits and expand horizons.
Yes, there is a cost to it as it extends in the short term the time it takes to get developers ramped up, however the long tail payoff is huge
Anything the business can control for: architectural designs, server costs, approaches to building out features / services for the business etc.
When you can mold someone's experience via a new language to model a domain, they become very efficient to it, when they have no prior notions to fall back on.
How many times have developers gone down the wrong path because of X did it this way? type thinking. When you can sufficiently remove that so all that is left to think about is the problem space, you do make more gains around that problem space.
My thesis from (albeit anecdotal) experience, is that when you have developers working in a new paradigm (often, this corresponds with a new language) you have better chances at establishing these things than having to consistently try and override a developers prior notions about how something should work / look.
The trade off is higher ramp times and slower on-boarding, of course. In the short term, it can be more costly.
To someone who starts their job on an Elixir codebase, it is just not a smooth onboarding at all. While the performance aspect is unparalleled compared to most of the popular scripting languages in the last decade, the price to pay to settle into Elixir seems huge to me.