[dogleash]

> "cool, learn python, but oh, you also should brush up on cobol while you are at it, you know." It's just bizarre.

It's more like learning python and also c. Depending on the library, python can smell a lot like the c underneath.

Sometimes you'd never know a python library is written in c, sometimes it's a manageable leak like the socket module, and sometimes it's opencv. Write enough python and you'll find C library wrappers so atrocious and/or badly documented that you just whip out ctypes and hack out a replacement wrapper yourself.

The reason you're hearing the answer you preemptively dismissed in the OP is that the distance between erlang and elixer is thin, much smaller than python and c. That's sorta the bed that elixir made itself.

If people believe elixir is held back by erlang, and that elixir should do it's best to hide erlang, then the the albatross is probably elixir around erlang's neck. Mindshare and time spent contributing (e.g. to documentation) should be further split between two very similar ecosystems? For what? Because it doesn't look enough like Ruby?