This is the same feeling I have. Well mostly toward Erlang. I was at an Erlang meetup and I've mentioned that the reason why Ruby is popular was because of RoR. Erlang needs a killer framework. A web framework would be a good choice since RoR have shown that. The consensus I got from this was basically Erlang doesn't need a killer software and the majority at the meetup thought the idea wasn't valid.
Here come Elixir and so far it have decent momentum. It got mix, ecto, etc.. tools. And all of a sudden the creator started to contribute to Phoenix framework. It got 2 books now and an OTP books coming out.
In general, I think Elixir is executing pretty well. If pheonix hit 1.0 that is comparable to RoR and can make restful service dead simple with oAuth, elixir might have a chance.
edit:
From what I've gathered:
The blog posts and online community of Erlang is mostly technical. The community at the local meetup is very against new ideas, they're stuck in a cycle of continuing the same path while complaining about how to get adoption rate up for Erlang...
Erlang's killer framework is OTP. Not everything is for writing webapps.
I'm happy for Erlang to never have a decent web framework. I prefer Erlang (I don't write webapps) but point everyone to Elixir and Phoenix if they want to do webapps.
I don't agree with this. Erlang has already frameworks but that is not the selling point of this language and environment. For me the reason to use Erlang is the concurrency patterns and the tooling. RoR is great to get you off the ground but when you hit bigger scale you have to replace it with something that is more memory efficient and supports high number of concurrent connections. Several companies proved this including Twitter, Opscode etc.
Erlang on the other hand lets you to use the same environment from day 1 to the time when you have 10M+ active users. You have to work on it but it is possible and there is no need to ditch the entire system because you got popular.
Every time I read about it, I thought, it is surreal more people have not heard of this.
I have considered in the last year learning Erlang 1 or 2 times just after stumbling upon it again in my history and being very impressed by feature lists and basic stats.
I even saw a sample Elixir project. Very cool stuff.
One part of that, and Nitrogen, that I really disagree with is "writing HTML via Erlang": the number of people who can hack on a template that is HTML with some processing instructions exceeds, by orders of magnitude, the number of people who can write Erlang.
Here come Elixir and so far it have decent momentum. It got mix, ecto, etc.. tools. And all of a sudden the creator started to contribute to Phoenix framework. It got 2 books now and an OTP books coming out.
In general, I think Elixir is executing pretty well. If pheonix hit 1.0 that is comparable to RoR and can make restful service dead simple with oAuth, elixir might have a chance.
edit:
From what I've gathered:
The blog posts and online community of Erlang is mostly technical. The community at the local meetup is very against new ideas, they're stuck in a cycle of continuing the same path while complaining about how to get adoption rate up for Erlang...