Elixir Is Erlang, not Ruby
As someone with a background in Objective-C, Swift, C++, C# and Java, and currently using Ruby, I'm looking for my next language for web development. Elixir sounds like a step up from Ruby, but I really miss static typing, and I find it hard to justify investing time in yet another language that doesn't have it.<p>But what are the alternatives? I'm looking for something with static typing, good editor support, mature community projects (e.g. testing on par with rspec), faster than Ruby (though most statically typed languages tend to be) and if it supports some functional paradigms that could be a plus (I dabbled in F# and SML previously).<p>- Scala is an option, but build times sound like an issue, and the JVM is a bit 'heavy' (e.g. startup times, min memory usage).<p>- Haskell sounds cool, but maybe a bit too esoteric? (i.e. is it worth the trouble, does it have all the middleware I'm used to)<p>- C# could be an option, but is the open source/community support there? (if you're not a corporate shop, doing corporate things).<p>- And then there's Rust, which I'm fascinated by, but I'm also worried that I'll be less productive worrying about lifetimes all the time, and that it's less mature (though growing fast, and seems to have attracted an amazing community of very talented people).<p>I'm also interested in ways to use a language like that in the frontend - Scalajs sounds pretty mature, C# has Blazor and Rust seems like one of the best ways to target WebAssembly.<p>So what is a boy to do? Stick to Ruby until the Rust web story is more mature? Try out Elixir in the meantime? Join the dark side and see what C# web dev is like these days? It can be really hard evaluating ecosystems like that from the outside.