[unoti]

There actually are good, obvious reasons to prefer Elixir to Erlang. Syntax is actually significant to productivity. For one quick example, Erlang requires you to terminate statements with either a comma, or a period, depending on whether it's the last statement in the section. If you move code around, you need to go back at the end and fix the commas and periods. Typically, this happens in the form of an error message, which leads to a tedious extra step that happens to me maybe 15 times a day when working with Erlang. That problem doesn't exist in Elixir. There are quite a few other nice things too. Elixir increases productivity in real ways.

[MetaCosm]

The syntax reason doesn't matter to existing Erlang developers -- you get used to the Erlang syntax, same as any other syntax.

The meta-programming on the other hand may well be a huge draw to Erlang shops.