As the creator of Phoenix, I've never written an Erlang program fwiw. That said, I frequent the Erlang docs and most seasoned Elixir developers will do the same because the standard library is a wealth of features, and the documentation while not 2022 polished, remains a remarkable resource. > I don't know what a solution is, but perhaps a concerted effort to create a documentation and library ecosystem that never li…
What would it take to programmatically port/transpile the core of Erlang's ecosystem to Elixir?
Pick the killer app to serve as the root node (Phoenix?) and walk back to the leaves (OTP, popular libraries, etc). Do a 1-time cutover of literally everything. Fork/port ERTS (incl BEAM) to make Elixir-native and rebrand it. Etc.
While I generally agree that "rewriting as bad" there is something to be said about the importance of _ease_ when bootstrapping and scaling an ecosystem. You're either stealing mindshare from an established ecosystem, or you're capturing new minds as they come in.
IMO Elixir/OTP is too radically different from other very-large ecosystems to benefit from transfer learning for junior/mid-level people (great similarity w/other smaller fringe ones, like Ruby, Clojure, etc, but that won't get us there), and the most senior people fall into the "it's all the same at the end of the day" trap and don't put in the energy absent some strong business driver. So you really need to reduce even the shallowest cognitive bumps to get escape velocity.