I come from Scala to Elixir and I personally prefer static typing for a lot of reasons. I have come to very much enjoy the looser typing as I can write more code more quickly, serialization is less of a pain, etc. Elixir is still compiled (and you have dialyzer if you really want to go that way.) You can match on a struct type and the compiler will catch a typo if you try to access a member that doesn't exist in the struct so you can go a long way to lean on the compiler. All that said, I can attribute +50% of the bugs that hit production to things that a type system would have caught. I would prefer to go back to writing code with Scala/Akka and would choose those technologies in a blink for any system that I'm going to grow over time. development time _is_ slower with scala/akka (assuming you don't count time spent trying to refactor or fixing bugs a typesystem would catch) but it's probably an order of magnitude faster for computational tasks, not slower on concurrency related items, has a bigger/more mature eco system (which is huuuuge) and gives you OO beside FP which is highly valuable for design. The skill ceiling is higher with scala/akka so you can keep growing and learning.

And OMG trying to refactor Scala vs trying to refactor elixir?? IntelliJ is a jet powered pogostick for applying refactorings (to quote Beck) - It's very had to make large structural changes to elixir code without a static type system and tools to help you rename, extract methods and classes, and move them around. I can do things in scala I would never dream attempting without aa type system which is probably my biggest gripe for long term maintenance.

That being said, working with elixir has turned me into an Emacs junkie and I personally find a lot of value in that but it doesn't help me deliver better code faster, just gives me nerd points because I can check the weather and reply to email from my textt editor