Elixir is pretty capable in many areas (as is Erlang). Me and others had private projects that do all sorts of other stuff – web crawlers, report generators, game bots – and Elixir has been very adequate.
That being said, Erlang / Elixir are very realistic about their use cases; if you want to do heavy number crunching and need every last penny out of your hardware, definitely do not go with them. If you need to code stuff like a DB index – which requires big and mutable data structures residing in fixed memory areas – then they might be a poor fit as well.
Outside of those scenarios though, Erlang / Elixir are very capable in almost whatever. Especially in the realm of distributed task orchestration, or transparently distributing work among all CPU cores, you will be very hard pressed to actually find something that is so good like Elixir.
(I’ve been voluntarily working on report generators in the last few months and the code that transparently distributes work among all CPU cores was 5 lines long… while the corresponding Java and Ruby sources were 30 - 100 lines long… and still didn’t get the job done well.)
A language’s “web popularity” is simply an artifact of what’s most sought after by the business people. The languages themselves remain quite flexible and able to do a lot regardless of what’s in popular demand.
You can achieve a lot in Elixir, as long as you don’t seek to replace C++ or Go or Rust with it.
