That was honestly one of the things that made an excellent first impression to me ~2.5 years ago with Elixir.
People on Reddit and HN have called Elixir “a language with good marketing” many times and I find myself in agreement with them… although I think the community should definitely go next-level and prepare several topical Wiki-like posts here in ElixirForum; it’s a natural next step IMO (this post is an excellent example of what I have in mind: HTTP client libraries and wrappers).
Elixir has very no-BS noob experience and this definitely won me over as the jaded C / C++ / Java / PHP / Javascript / Ruby programmer that I was back then.
(Anti-example: deployment. I found Distillery really quick to start with but there’s so many manual steps to do that I have to wonder why are there no wrappers or generators yet. Hell, even if they require 20 CLI parameters I’ll still take it, deployment shouldn’t be such a delicate and brittle job).
So to answer @emeidell – documentation is important because there’s very good tooling that can be built around it (ex_doc; seamlessly building documentation is extremely important for wide adoption, including in corporations) and because it’s a very good marketing tool to show initiating programmers that the language is community-friendly.
