Ask HN: Who regrets choosing Elixir?

In May 2020, a Hacker News thread titled "Who regrets choosing Elixir?" ran for several days and accumulated more than 300 comments. Many participants coming from Ruby and Rails backgrounds reported positive experiences, particularly around concurrency-heavy workloads such as WebSockets, and pointed to system stability over time. Others, often describing teams that later moved away, focused on recurring friction points: difficulty hiring engineers comfortable with BEAM and OTP concepts, a comparatively small ecosystem that pushed teams toward maintaining internal libraries, and operational complexity when Erlang-style supervision hierarchies were combined with container-based deployment models.

The thread included accounts of companies rewriting Elixir services in more widely adopted languages after key developers left, citing increased on-call load and reduced maintainability. At the same time, other contributors described organizations that adopted Elixir selectively after internal evaluations and standardized on it for new infrastructure where its concurrency model was seen as a good fit.