No I don't mean it in a way that is subjective. It does depend on person to person because of factors in their knowledge and situation, history etc etc, but elixir lives in a world that the others don't. Making a language that plays on the erlang vm and has complete access to OTP was a good solve. Other languages haven't been able to replicate OTP despite attempts (and they likely won't). It's not better for everything and the language isn't somehow obviuosly better, it just solved the right problem if you want easy web scale that doesn't do things like drop connections when you release or have a difficult concurrency model. Functional programming is a grind at first but it's a good fit for this world and elixir is more accessable day to day than erlang. I have way more experience with PHP but there are limitations there that can't be solved. So I would say that both your points apply, I am making the claim that X is better than Y because of core value reasons, but that doesn't mean that economically other languages don't make sense for web programming. I still make new projects in PHP and Python because of existing infra at work and others that can't/won't learn elixir and co. We'll just be making something slightly inferior and not be building tools for a more pleasant future, but it still makes money for the biz and isn't terrible