[pessimizer]

> In truth, I've never met anyone who likes Elixir except people who were already Ruby programmers.

This was the purpose of the language (or if not an explicit purpose, the primary effect.) Elixir created an environment that attracted Rails people (and other people repulsed by languages that don't look like C/Algol), and behind the Rails people (Rails been long established as a safe choice but aging and scaling badly) comes management of safe companies and consultancies, and with that comes a sure way of making a living for people who love Erlang and are willing to play the Elixir game.

Elixir is the same as Erlang, except with bad syntax and loaded with various ways to make your programs indecipherable, and with a cleaned up standard library and lots of nice little affordances/templates to help with processes and OTP. While Elixir (in my experience) takes a lot more debugging due to the weird javascripty syntax and pseudo-mutable variables, it's the same thing in my book (and the error messages are great.)

Happy to do the one that provides the most work, and thankful that they created it.

[josevalim]

It was not the purpose of the language nor I believe it is its primary effect. It was the immediate effect though.

At last ElixirConf, I remember asking for a show of hands on people's backgrounds, and I would say Ruby was 40-50%. It is impossible to know how it applies to the community as a whole, but I think the idea that Elixir is "Erlang for Ruby" is several years dated at this point.