That seems wrong, what made you think such a thing?
There wasn’t anything I wasn’t able to build with Elixir so far – except maybe native desktop GUI (though there are efforts even for that). People do all sorts of web apps with or without frontend (Phoenix, Ash, Absinthe), CLI programs, embedded apps (via Nerves), deep learning (Nx), interactive demonstrations or visualized flows (Livebook), and others.
Elixir, and with it Ecto, Phoenix, Ash, Absinthe et. al. are not an overkill. You’re not “punished for not using the entire package” (I heard that said several times from other programmers). If anything, I’ve spoken with a fair amount of programmers who degraded Elixir’s ecosystem for “having to manually assemble your app”, i.e. you can just pick and choose and build exactly what you need.
Ruby on Rails nowadays is either for people who want to build a prototype extremely quickly, or those who are stuck in huge legacy projects. From where I’m standing there are zero reasons to pick RoR for a new project these days unless you want to have a big hiring pool of cheap outsourced devs (which is a good enough reason for many businesses, mind you).
Python is just a bad language any way you slice it. It’s carried by nostalgia (“When I knew nothing, I wrote my first Python program and, gasp, it worked!”), as if we’re talking about their first love – always found that sentiment extremely weird when we’re addressing technology btw. No idea why are people so touchy feely about their first thing in computers but I find it extremely unconvincing as an argument for using Python, or any other technology really.
Python is also carried by huge network effects – professors teach it in universities and the very non-romantic truth is that most of those professors never knew anything else.
All of that being said, I crossed paths with Django before and liked it – it’s a very well done piece of technology. But it falls in the same segment as RoR IMO; prototyping or legacy projects. Every Django dev I’ve ever known has said that from one scale and above it becomes a big pain to maintain.
Elixir’s ecosystem shines with its modularity. You can mix and match and assemble your own LEGO. And of course that’s not seamless, you have to take care of it.
That’s what repels many programmers. But it is also what attracted me and most of the community here on this forum.
Obviously we’re a bit biased in favor of Elixir, so draw your own conclusions. Still, we also shouldn’t pretend that all technologies are equally good. They aren’t.
