> limited ability to take full advantage of some of its unique features in many cases
Honestly, this shouldn't count as a downside. :) The way I frame it is "in the worst case scenario, you can deploy Erlang/Elixir as you would any other language".
You don't need to use distribution, you can still build stateless apps, etc. And yes, almost nobody uses hot code swapping!
However, whenever you need a specialized solution, such as quick messaging between servers, proper concurrency so a slow upstream server doesn't kill your app, etc... you have that at your fingertips!
Even if you are not using any of that in production, you are still leveraging concurrency when compiling code, running tests, etc. It really makes a large difference! And if for some reason you cannot leverage any of that either, the languages are still great on their own. Pattern matching and immutability are a joy, developers feel productive within the existing frameworks, and so on.
My car can go 260km/h but I never went past 140km/h (speed limit where I live) and I still love it (the best car I ever had).
Honestly, this shouldn't count as a downside. :) The way I frame it is "in the worst case scenario, you can deploy Erlang/Elixir as you would any other language".
You don't need to use distribution, you can still build stateless apps, etc. And yes, almost nobody uses hot code swapping!
However, whenever you need a specialized solution, such as quick messaging between servers, proper concurrency so a slow upstream server doesn't kill your app, etc... you have that at your fingertips!
Even if you are not using any of that in production, you are still leveraging concurrency when compiling code, running tests, etc. It really makes a large difference! And if for some reason you cannot leverage any of that either, the languages are still great on their own. Pattern matching and immutability are a joy, developers feel productive within the existing frameworks, and so on.
My car can go 260km/h but I never went past 140km/h (speed limit where I live) and I still love it (the best car I ever had).