Yes, it absolutely is an improvement over erlang-style tuples IMO, and it also vastly improves the interoperability story between the stdlib, date/time/calendar libs, and database libs.
My own personal experience doesn't matter much, though, because ultimately Elixir is Erlang and obviously Erlang has been pushed extremely hard in production (Klarna, Heroku, Riot Games, etc.).
I have to say that learning and using Elixir has been more pleasant than any other language I have ever worked with. Code is easy to follow due to the functional nature of the language, and the community is one of the best out there.
The applications I've written and deployed have been more stable and fault-tolerant than anything else I've ever done, and I've yet to have any performance issues with the language in production.
This creates a remote (in this case just another directory on your local machine) and you have to push to it, rather than your commits and changes instantly being synced to dropbox
Agreed on your last point. I stopped reading halfway through because of all the (questionable) assumptions the author made.
I'm a massive fan of Obj-C and I think it could be a great tool for web development, but (other than potential advantages when interacting with Obj-C clients) I don't really see it as having any advantages over other platforms. Windows devs are never going to use Obj-C for their web development and I'm not really convinced OSX/Linux devs are not going to move away from Ruby/Python/PHP/Java, either.
Biggest problem with these games (I've found, anyway) is that your sword controller cannot magically stop in mid air when your virtual sword hits another sword or a wall or whatever. It really ruins the immersion.
It's not actually syntax. The language allows you to define infix operators, and they're just functions like any other with full documentation searchable on hoogle: http://www.haskell.org/hoogle/
To be fair, monadic code does not necessarily have side effects. It's just a useful way of thinking about computational steps. `Maybe` is a monad that is completely pure and has no side effects: http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/latest/html/libraries/base/s...
I understand that this article is geared towards beginners, so this is probably just a simplification on the author's part. Other than that it's a great article.
(sorry, had to)