Enjoyed @dhh's appeal to simplicity and self-reliance in his Rails World talk. It's well-known that @elixirlang's syntax is inspired by @rubylangorg's syntax. But it's less appreciated that the similarities run much deeper. Elixir has long valued a lot of the same things that Ruby has. One of those is a "batteries included" ethos. For instance, both Ruby and Elixir have best-in-class standard libraries and a best-in-class web framework + ORM. Elixir takes this ethos to the limit, though. Further than any other toolchain I'm aware of. Ruby developers are well-aware that Elixir has an interesting model for concurrency. In the early days, Elixir/Phoenix was understood as a concurrent Ruby/Rails alt. Before I adopted Elixir, my mental model was "Ruby but with Celluloid/actors as first-class." But that barely scratches the surface. Elixir runs on the Erlang VM (BEAM). Packaged with that VM is something called the Open Telecom Platform (OTP). It's like having another standard library. Except this library operates a layer up from iterating over enumerables or performing mathematical operations. It's a complete toolkit for building concurrent, distributed applications. At the core of that toolkit is the process. You can spawn a process, send it messages, introspect its state, get notified if it crashes, guarantee that it's restarted. And here's the thing: practically every application and service is a concurrent, distributed system. For example, in all modern frameworks, each user request spawns some isolated thread/process/heap. Any time you have more than one server, you're in a distributed environment. Even if it just means a single web server node communicating with a Postgres database. Erlang feels like it was built in a parallel universe, far from the JVM/.NET battle that influenced much of the landscape today. I think it's a miss that we built a generation of tooling without distributed primitives baked-in. When you see up close what it's like to build with OTP, it feels like a glaring, missing hole in other stacks. It's like a language missing file descriptors. As a result, there's an extreme maximalism you can take with Elixir/OTP. You don't need Kubernetes, you have process lifecycle built in. You might not need Redis, you have ETS. You don't need to split your app into different services, you can create logical boundaries within a single distributed system. This maximalism breeds simplicity. Or, stated in a single image (h/t @whizzaf):