I think it depends on your goals and your background. Already familiar with functional programming and the actor model? Elixir. You'll pick up enough Erlang as

I think it depends on your goals and your background. Already familiar with functional programming and the actor model? Elixir. You'll pick up enough Erlang as you do to be fluent in both; except for macros it's essentially just a syntax difference. Not familiar with either functional programming or the actor model? Erlang. Because the fact that almost none of the syntax is familiar I found helpful to absorb the concepts, and the right way of doing things. I can't speak to Elixir directly, as it wasn't around when I learned Erlang, but other functional languages that offered me familiar constructs invited me to misunderstand them and misuse them, and either write non-idiomatic code, or to get frustrated when things behaved in ways I did not expect (and even Erlang isn't perfect here, the 'if' construct behaves very differently than most languages, and was a stumbling block for me initially). In short, I found the unfamiliarity of the syntax helpful for grokking the concepts. YMMV.