I'd like to think that if we weren't all watching Node we'd have more people to pitch into other things. I hear a lot of bluster about "learn new things" but I often just see people sticking with what they know. When the bright minds of web development are figuring out new ways to make JavaScript less awful, those minds aren't focusing on other solutions.
FWIW I think Elixir holds a lot of promise for the future. Projects like https://github.com/dynamo/dynamo look really cool. Of course, it's new, and alpha. But maybe we could all give it a try?
Erlang pretty much blows Node.js out of the water, in terms of sophistication of concurrency primitives (to mention one thing). Erlang is really just syntax on top of BEAM, which is pretty tailored to the language (you'll notice Elixir and Erlang share identical types etc).
Elixir adds some nice metaprogramming features, and I love that it exists. Erlang is used for a lot of Important Things in production, and its value to many developers is stability and fault tolerance. Erlang moves slow. It's nice to see a sister language that can more rapidly develop new language features (maybe some of the goods ones will get added to Erlang (:
Joe Arms post about Elixir is pretty interesting [1]
FWIW I think Elixir holds a lot of promise for the future. Projects like https://github.com/dynamo/dynamo look really cool. Of course, it's new, and alpha. But maybe we could all give it a try?