Love seeing a good Prolog story surface. I was blown away by how productive it was to use back in university along with XPCE for UI. Became the first language I expertised in and it has paid off in terms of opening up a lot of other avenues like being able to easily learn Erlang and Elixir.
There isn't always a good reason to use it for many situations nowadays but it the way you deal with graphs and trees and such is fantastic. Though fun fact Allegrograph has a Prolog rules interface
No I don't mean it in a way that is subjective. It does depend on person to person because of factors in their knowledge and situation, history etc etc, but elixir lives in a world that the others don't. Making a language that plays on the erlang vm and has complete access to OTP was a good solve. Other languages haven't been able to replicate OTP despite attempts (and they likely won't). It's not better for everything and the language isn't somehow obviuosly better, it just solved the right problem if you want easy web scale that doesn't do things like drop connections when you release or have a difficult concurrency model. Functional programming is a grind at first but it's a good fit for this world and elixir is more accessable day to day than erlang. I have way more experience with PHP but there are limitations there that can't be solved. So I would say that both your points apply, I am making the claim that X is better than Y because of core value reasons, but that doesn't mean that economically other languages don't make sense for web programming. I still make new projects in PHP and Python because of existing infra at work and others that can't/won't learn elixir and co. We'll just be making something slightly inferior and not be building tools for a more pleasant future, but it still makes money for the biz and isn't terrible
Go into it with the attitude of 'deferal of gratitude'. In other words it might look painful for a while but when various things click you get your holy s moments and you'll never go back. I've worked in a lot of java, php, python, c# etc frameworks and there are very specific reasons this is near always better long term. A lot of it comes back to elixir simply solving the correct problems. Learn elixir using the elixir lang site guides and then jump into phoenix using their official guides. Eventually you'll experience the upsides and versatility
Agree with untog; freedom is hugest and I'd add having a decent risk tolerence. But since value is also important I'd say my knowledge of economics helped me grow the most; especially relative to other developers. My instincts honed from that allow me to very easily tell fads from real solutions and plan for long term team development.
The balance trying to be achieved can most simply be described as known good content vs. discovery. I wouldn't call it uneven it's more like; this is interesting vs we might think you'll find this interesting but we're taking a gamble because it has low visibility. I'm betting subreddits can move from cluster to cluster over time as well fairly frequently. Maybe an interesting thing to try to track over the next month or 2?
There isn't always a good reason to use it for many situations nowadays but it the way you deal with graphs and trees and such is fantastic. Though fun fact Allegrograph has a Prolog rules interface