> ”Go and Rust allow distributing a static binary, but at the cost of fewer people at Shopify being inclined to contribute due to the lack of familiarity with the language.”

If learning a language as simple as Golang is a real barrier for Shopify engineers, then I’d say they need to reevaluate their hiring processes. Especially given that they’re talking about CLI apps as opposed to something like distributed systems.

I’ve hired multiple engineers who had zero experience with Elixir at all and it’s generally just taken a couple of days to get up to speed. I’ve had the same experience on client projects, too. I don’t think Elixir is as difficult to learn as JS or Rust, but Golang might even be simpler given how small the language is.