Same experience here. I have a process that I generally go through to compare languages...I rebuild my blog. It's an exercise that I've done many times and it gives me a time-boxed experience that compares work flow, database interaction, web requests, dealing with CSS/JS/assets, potentially caching, routes, email, search, etc.

It's not a perfect measure but it does a solid job of giving me the whole experience of working with a language on something similar to day to day and separates the "this is viable as a tool" from "OMG! BENCHMARK!" type experiences.

Doing this with Elixir and Phoenix was mind blowing. It was so clean, efficient to work with, efficient in performance and the design decisions around the language almost ensure you'll avoid entire classes of debugging / maintenance issues in the future. I was blown away.

Wrote about it here: http://www.brightball.com/articles/insanity-with-elixir-phoe...

Keep in mind, there are a number of things that I did there that could have been done better/cleaner. It was my first experience with the language.

I believe the popular quote with Erlang is that Erlang makes hard things easy & easy things hard. Elixir was built around the idea of keeping the easy things easy. It does so by improving syntax, tooling, documentation & community in my opinion.

I believe I first read this idea in the book, Elixir in Action.

Personally, I'm a fan of the Perl philosophy: make the easy things easy and the hard things possible.

I've heard this said about NixOS: It makes the easy things hard and the impossible things hard. :)