Personal anecdote: I have worked in about many C-family languages such as C, C++, Java, JS, Scala and others. I had looked at Erlang a few times but felt that t

Personal anecdote: I have worked in about many C-family languages such as C, C++, Java, JS, Scala and others. I had looked at Erlang a few times but felt that the syntax was not very approachable. However, I found Elixir to be extremely approachable even though I have no experience with Ruby/Python. Now that I have some exposure to Elixir and various FP concepts as implemented in Erlang/BEAM I can grok Erlang code without much effort even though I have no formally read its syntax. So, long story short: Everyone is different, if you're interested in Erlang/BEAM it doesn't matter whether you start with Elixir or Erlang.