> I don't get why people think Elixir is like Ruby. Other than some syntactic similarities, I can't think of any substantial similarities.
The creators of elixir were rubyists. As someone who used to Ruby and now Elixirs, a lot of the joy of the platform (relevant to gp's comment) has made it over. Elixir is legitimately as fun to program in as Ruby, if not more so. I think that the developers of elixir care about the user experience in a way that basically no other language seems to.
I could of course be biased because before Ruby I used to program in an actor-like C++ framework, so everything just feels like I'm coming home to a home I never knew existed to me.
Phoenix is similar to Rails superficially, I’m so far as they both have some MVCish structure and some generators. The similarities really stop there though.
Phoenix doesn’t have a magical asset pipeline, it doesn’t have a whole library of language extensions a la ActiveSupport, it doesn’t represent dB rows as objects. Those are just a few things off the top of my head.
Additionally all requests to an app running Phoenix/Cowboy/Plug are separate processes and can happen in parallel without having to stand up multiple app instances.