I use Elixir for scripting all the time. Of course you don’t want Elixir for tools such as ls or tree or grep, and for tools that you want to start very fast (like a note taking CLI app for instance).

But for all custom scripts that have something to do with the filesystem, or call to HTTP Apis, the scripts are easy to write, to test and to debug.

If you are going to use that script only 100 times but spend 1 hour instead of 3 to write it then you win against the BEAM startup time. mix test take some time to start, but ExUnit is great, it’s worth it, and honestly it’s not that slow anyway.

Scripting doesn’t have anything to do with it, Ruby and Python have bootstrapping time that I find unacceptable as well as Erlang’s / Elixir’s. They all need time to get going.

For scripting I use bash / zsh if it’s something quick / one-off, or reach for Golang if I suspect I’ll use the tool regularly and need logic that bash / zsh make difficult to code (and sadly they have a lot of foot guns).

It’s “per se” btw.

Many of us would wet their pants if the BEAM has CLI parameters that would allow it to boot much faster (maybe at the cost of initializing apps slower? no idea), trust me. There was a discussion some months ago about it and there were various options listed even by core Erlang maintainers but none of them truly helped.

I’ve experienced two problems with elixir scripting 1) slow startup time 2) lack of ‘getch’. If neither of these matter to you, then Elixir is great for scripting! Check out Ratatouille a very nice TUI toolkit for Elixir.