Unless you are fine letting old homebrew work its "magic" - the installation is too lengthy and involved for a new language. It should just be click, download:
That is the biggest gotcha for me. There doesn't seem to be a simple installer or binary you just get up and running unlike other major languages. Is it a distribution issue with erlang or something? I'd have thought it'd be easy to package it up.
Not requiring a package manager is the point. Python, node, Zig etc supply binaries or a binary installer for each major OS, so why not Elixir? I can't see how it'd be a bad thing for anyone.
I imagine that part is slightly complicated by the fact that it requires host language runtime (Erlang). Elixir compiled with one version of OTP is not necessarily compatible with another version so supporting binaries for N versions of Elixir becomes NxM problem when you factor in OTP versions, plus supporting distribution of OTP binaries is probably complicated in itself. If there is a problem with OTP, users would swarm first party distributor, but their ability to help would be very limited.
https://elixir-lang.org/install.html
That is the biggest gotcha for me. There doesn't seem to be a simple installer or binary you just get up and running unlike other major languages. Is it a distribution issue with erlang or something? I'd have thought it'd be easy to package it up.