I&#x27;ve been &quot;obsessed&quot; with Elixir lately, and it truly is a breath of fresh air in the current programming language landscape.<p>I&#x27;ve started with C, built a career with backend Python services&#x2F;dashboards, and spent some time on the &quot;fringe&quot; learning about Lisp, Scheme, Haskell, Clojure.  And once you rewire your brain with functional programming constructs or immutability, it is really hard to go back to Python, using large libraries feels too much like magic (if you ever used Django, raise your hands if you&#x27;ve ever had to delve into the source code to understand what is going on).<p>I&#x27;ve had a fling with Go, I really like some of its ideas, namely static linking, native compilation, no exceptions, easy deploy (I wrote a huge Django 1.6 app shipped as RPM for RHEL 5 enterprise servers, and that was truly the definition of pain). I disliked the lack of functional constructs such as map, reduce, filter, and it felt a step back from the &quot;fringe&quot; languages I&#x27;ve been studying.<p>Then I discovered Elixir.<p>It&#x27;s a mix between Haskell without purity and types and Clojure without parens, with a Ruby-style syntax and a battle-tested framework for concurrency and distributed computing.<p>It&#x27;s like an immutable Python. With built-in virtualenv + pip tooling. And first-class macros. And pattern matching.<p>Pair that with a sane standard library (unit testing? logging? documentation? We&#x27;ve got you covered), a REPL, a LINQ-style lightweight ORM, and a very interesting web framework built around modern tech (websockets, JSON APIs, ES6).<p>And binary compatible with the most robust concurrency and supervision system, Erlang&#x2F;OTP.<p>I know I talk like a fanboy, but, man, programming feels like joy again.