The short version:<p>* &#x27;event driven&#x27; things like Node.js got popular because they use fewer resources to serve the same amount of data (generally).  But for a lot of people, JS is not really their idea of a good time.  Erlang (and Go) fill this niche pretty well.<p>* Elixir finally made Erlang more palatable to more people.  Jose has done a superb job with it, because it&#x27;s not just a nicer syntax, there is a bunch of nice stuff he&#x27;s built into it.  It doesn&#x27;t hurt that as a former(?) member of the Rails core team, he has a deep understanding of web programming and its requirements.<p>* It is solid, solid tech.  There&#x27;s lots of new development happening on top of, say, Elixir, like Phoenix, but the underlying system is pretty hardened.