Why Elixir? A Rebuttal to Common Misconceptions

Summary

Source: OpenAI [ED: I am sick and tired of having to justify “Why Elixir?” so I decided to write down all of the reasons why in one spot!] Braingasm Why Elixir? A Rebuttal to Common Misconceptions I’m all-in on the Elixir programming ecosystem. Seriously. I love the idea of a single codebase that works glass-to-tin — and while other platforms have made similar promises, I’ve never seen it truly delivered until I started working with Elixir. It’s often dismissed by teams unfamiliar with its capabilities, usually because it sits outside the mainstream stacks. But in a world where AI-assisted development is changing how we build software, popularity and fitness-for-purpose aren’t the same thing. Elixir isn’t just a sound choice — it’s often the best choice for building scalable, maintainable, high-performance applications. Over the last eight months, I’ve grown increasingly tired of having to explain why Elixir is such a strong — if not the best — platform for modern, AI-powered, LLM-assisted web and mobile development. I found myself repeating the same arguments so often that I decided to write them down once, properly. A blog post to summarise the case. And a deeply researched [ED: thanks, GPT Deep Research!] paper with all the details and references. Now, instead of arguing, I can just send a link. Enjoy! 1. Built for Scalability, Concurrency, and Resilience Elixir runs on the Erlang VM (BEAM), which was purpose-built for distributed, concurrent, fault-tolerant systems. This makes it a natural fit for modern SaaS applications, real-time features, APIs, messaging backends, marketplaces, and transactional systems. You get: Lightweight, isolated processes (millions of them) Preemptive scheduling Supervisors and fault tolerance are baked into the runtime Hot code upgrades with no downtime These capabilities aren’t optional extras — they’re the default behaviour. You don’t need to orchestrate this with extra tooling. It’s just how the platform works. 2. A Mature, Product...