[lectrick]

I thought Erlang looked weirder than Elixir (to the extent that I was turned off until Elixir came along), but fortunately, both of our opinions are compatible as everything compiles down to BEAM and is interoperable :)

From a semantic persopective I've found that I almost automatically understand Erlang just from working with Elixir. Some things like OTP are pretty much identical. Plus you get "real" macros :)

[rdtsc]

Yeah good point, Elixir is not just Erlang with a different syntax. It has streams, macros and a few other nice things. I believe Jose Valim likes to emphasise that point as well.

Now I personally prefer Erlang's syntax. I like that it is different because I know semantically stuff behaves differently. I would be more confused and disturbed by it if it looked like Java for example. I also like the immutable variables aspect..

However at the end of the day I am very happy to see Elixir grow. It really has one of the friendliest and most welcoming community. It will hopefully bring more people to the BEAM VM ecosystem.

[lectrick]

> I also like the immutable variables aspect.

Elixir has the same immutable variables. I don't know why this is such a misconception. Erlang conflates rebinding and reassignment, Elixir does not, and the tradeoffs seem to (overall) be better in Elixir's case. Here, read the language creators' explanation as to why that is, it's the best:

http://blog.plataformatec.com.br/2016/01/comparing-elixir-an...

Very succinct and (hopefully) puts this misconception to bed.

[rvirding]

The OTP are identical because both use the same OTP, the original Erlang OTP. Elixir just puts a wrapper around it to give a more elixir feel. And add default callbacks which I personally don't like.