Ha, same. I wrote a VOD transcoding orchestrator in Elixir that triggered libav transcodes and custom packaging code in Python. Loved the syntax, and in particular the pattern matching in function headers. It was so clean for recursive branching that I ended up favoring recursion over conditionals and loops everywhere. Whether that was overuse or just good taste is subjective. We did hit a real scaling problem with the BEAM though. Distributed Erlang uses a full mesh, every node connects to every other node. When we got close to 50 nodes the inter-node communication overhead was eating a significant chunk of our CPU. Adding more nodes started giving diminishing returns because the mesh traffic grew faster than the compute we gained. Interesting constraint that I haven't hit in any other runtime since.