There are multitude of microservices written in Golang, Python, Ruby, Java, etc. and they seem to be doing just fine. As you have seen, this is not enough of an argument to convince people to leave the languages and tools they know and pursue something different. You’re trying to address a pain point which is just not there or is small enough that people don’t care. People won’t jump to another stack for 10% (or whatever the number may be) of quality of life improvements - they’ll rather work on bringing those QoL improvements to their current stack.
I think I sort of have given up on that after leading a merit-driven process to introduce Elixir in a company I worked for. More than half-way through, the whole thing was shut down by the higher management because of newly created engineering team’s policies about the allowed tech stacks. The decision kind of made sense from the company’s perspective, but I got burned out when we were told we didn’t meet the criteria that were actually not known to us upfront (or maybe those were just excuses after the fact…).
From the company’s point of view, in many (most?) of the cases, the technology is secondary to their business. The product is the king; then you need a good team that can consistently deliver. Does it matter what language it’s written in? Use the good enough tool for the job.
From the individual’s perspective, I’d suggest just looking for companies that are already doing Elixir or places where you’ll be in position to dictate the tech stack.
This is coming out pretty negative, but frankly speaking this is what you’re up against when you go out to people. I think an approach that would work is to rather encourage people to try out Elixir instead of convincing them that it’s better. Show them what can be easily done in Elixir but might be hard in other languages (LiveView maybe; but then there’s LiveWire…). Reach out to folks that are genuinely curious and looking for something new to learn. José’s Advent of Code live stream is a prime example.
