Yep. That pie-in-the-sky dream of “they all can leave and the project will keep getting new features and bugfixes starting next week with the new team” almost never happens. But it’s one of the brain bugs of us the people (especially businessmen) – it’s an illusion that is so pleasant that we scream at whoever tries to ruin it. It’s still an illusion 99% of the time though.

Code is much more often read than written, so a language being concise helps hugely with that.

Well, Clojure is a very practical modern LISP. But the lack of the BEAM’s runtime guarantees ruins most languages for me.

Absolutely. Additionally, and for all the hate that fringier tech (like Elixir) has to endure on HN/Reddit, Elixir is still quite damn fast in many scenarios. I’ve lately crafted a Rust tool that is 45% faster than the Elixir tool I wrote before it when calculating a histogram on files as big as 1GB (although I am sure the Rust code can be made faster; however, most people do a task and move on so I’m rather sure many won’t spend more than a day on it so it’s still a fair comparison).

That very much depends on what is being done though. “Let it crash” is completely useless if you have a bug in your code that makes a process crash and get infinitely restarted. And if it only gets restarted N times then you now have a system that gave up on trying to run something. I agree that this philosophy can be applied quite well for many scenarios – DB pools and DB exceptions being a prominent example – but it’s also one of the things that people kind of believe will solve a lot of problems via magic. Which it cannot do.