Thank you for sharing this. If you are open to some constructive feedback, I'd say - The best help that Elixir can get at this moment is endorsements / detailed-examples from large and respected companies. That will help a lot of developers convince themselves and their teams that Elixir is ready to be considered seriously. So, although the brief mention (and some data) that Pinterest is using Elixir for Pinterest API and Ads API was helpful, more details about how Pinterest is using it and more details about what benefits it's getting because of that would help Elixir and its future users a lot!
The advantages are quite tangible, apparently (the best kind of argument, frankly). To excerpt some metrics from that link:
"So, we like Elixir and have seen some pretty big wins with it. The system that manages rate limits for both the Pinterest API and Ads API is built in Elixir. Its 50 percent response time is around 500 microseconds with a 90 percent response time of 800 microseconds. Yes, microseconds (millionths of a second). ...We’ve also seen an improvement in code clarity. We’re converting our notifications system from Java to Elixir. The Java version used an Actor system and weighed in at around 10,000 lines of code. The new Elixir system has shrunk this to around 1000 lines. The Elixir based system is also faster and more consistent than the Java one and runs on half the number of servers."
I'm not the kind of person to regularly use the exclamation, but I couldn't help saying "holy shit!" aloud when I first read that.
Are you referring to the LOC or the response times? If you're talking about the response times, then it totally depends on what the system was doing. Microsecond response times are achievable in any language, if e.g. you never had to talk to any external resources.
This just came up on my feed yesterday, might be interesting to you as well - post by a analytics company on moving parts of their system from MySQL-backed Ruby to a DB-free Elixir backed structure: https://moz.com/devblog/moz-analytics-db-free/
