Ruby syntax with a focus on fine grained transforming functions. Isn’t that essentially exactly what Elixir/Phoenix tries to provide, but without the Amazon lock-in or price tag?
Fair enough. But I did twenty years as a Smalltalk developer, including 6 years being tools/gui lead at one of the commercial vendors.
I’ve played with Ruby, but not enough to get invested. It wasn’t OOP at the level I was used to.
I do Elixir, and it’s the first time I’ve had those “this is so elementarily cool” feelings since my 10 year hiatus from Smalltalk. The thing I like least about Elixir is it’s use ruby-esque do/end and it’s quasi inclusion of new lines as a sometimes relevant syntactic element.
It's not just ruby syntax, it's ruby. Maybe some people want the ruby ecosystem, or just don't want to leave what they are used to.
I haven't used Elixir, I couldn't say how similar it is to ruby, but my understanding is that it is a pretty different language despite some syntax similarities. Perl and C have some syntax similarities, but...