[praveenperera]

I completely disagree. You don’t need to learn Erlang to learn elixir.

Learn elixir use it, you can be very productive with it. If later for whatever reason you want to dive deeper into Erlang you can.

I’ve used elixir for 5 years now. And I’ve never had to Erlang, the most I’ve done is use some Erlang libraries in elixir.

Elixir can stand on its own

[PopeDotNinja]

I guess is depends on what you're working on. There are a ton of things I've needed to understand about Erlang. gen_statem, gen_tcp, gen_udp, gen_event, crypto, ssl, etc.

[praveenperera]

Yes I agree, depending on the project you might need to dip into some Erlang libraries. But that's a far cry from needing to learn Erlang first.

I remember reading things like "you should learn Erlang before learning Elixir to be really effective" scared me off learning Elixir for a little bit as well.

Also, I find the more familiar you get with Elixir, the easier it becomes to read Erlang code.

[lawik]

I've happily dipped into Erlang libs when I need to. I'm also increasingly capable of reading Erlang code though I only write Elixir. I would not recommend starting with all of Erlang before doing Elixir but it may work better for some folks.