[rkangel]

The language itself is a dynamic, functional programming language. The benefits of functional programming languages have been much discussed (and much disagreed with), but Elixir is a particularly gentle introduction to the space while being a great language to work with.

The other key feature is that Erlang/Elixir/Beam implement 'the actor programming model'. This is a series of separate bits of code that have their own state and communicate to each other with messages. It turns out that for long running processes (web servers, control software etc.) this model is an excellent way to build your code. A lot of code ends up doing a subset of this, and usually not that well. Elixir gives you the tools to do it properly and easily.