Elixir's docs and guides are quite thorough and overwhelmingly focused on practical applications, I'm sorry that you clearly haven't had a good experience personally.
Again, though, reading between the lines, it sounds distinctly like your complaint is with the ecosystem and its maturity, not anything to do with the language itself. "No, it's not that!" you say, as you go on to mention three very, very mature languages with massive ecosystems that I do agree are a very different world.
Python, Ruby, and PHP are all great! It's difficult to even think of a language that has a better wealth of guides and resources out there than any of those three (with the exception of maybe JavaScript). Elixir and Erlang, two fairly niche languages that are the actual topic of conversation for this overarching thread, simply aren't comparable in that regard.
When Ruby and Rails were first getting popular in the English-speaking world, around 2008 to 2011, the documentation and community really were excellent for their size, which was a substantial contributing factor to the growth of the language. PHP, on the other hand, was pretty appalling.
Elixir inherited some of the Ruby history and contributors, and has some of the same strengths.
Again, though, reading between the lines, it sounds distinctly like your complaint is with the ecosystem and its maturity, not anything to do with the language itself. "No, it's not that!" you say, as you go on to mention three very, very mature languages with massive ecosystems that I do agree are a very different world.
Python, Ruby, and PHP are all great! It's difficult to even think of a language that has a better wealth of guides and resources out there than any of those three (with the exception of maybe JavaScript). Elixir and Erlang, two fairly niche languages that are the actual topic of conversation for this overarching thread, simply aren't comparable in that regard.