That's not what I meant! It's that I've witnessed Erlang releases for quite a long time (as everyone), but the coming of Elixir (and me starting using it) made me care about them.
Random numbers (18 vs Python's 3 or Java's 8) don't mean anything without comparing the release cycles and version numbering schemes as well.
I could make small incremental updates to a toy language and release them every week to get to FooBarLang 200.0.0, that doesn't mean it's progressing faster than a language at release 2 or 10.
Also switching to the Apache license will make adoption of Erlang/Elixir more possible for certain organizations.
Elixir also gets to reap any performance improvements at runtime and compilation.