Either you learn Erlang, or you learn Erlang and Elixir. This seems to be the case for languages running on a VM originally developed for another language: Wr

Either you learn Erlang, or you learn Erlang and Elixir. This seems to be the case for languages running on a VM originally developed for another language: Writing in Scala, Kotlin, or Clojure? You'll still need to know Java. Coffeescript or Dart? You'll still need to know Javascript.* Usually this comes up during debugging or interfacing with existing libraries. For some of these, they're really just a pretty syntax on top of the same semantics as the 'host' language. Others can offer both a new syntax and some improved semantics (to the extent of the capabilities of the underlying VM). Whether the overhead of keeping the mental models for two languages in your head is worth the gain I think depends on what you're familiar with and which of these language pairs you're looking at. For this pair in particular, I don't think you're getting around learning Erlang. The syntax of Erlang is 'weird', but that ends up not being the hard part of writing Erlang. The hard/wonderful part is the semantics, and Elixir doesn't fundamentally change those. Personally I don't think the benefits of most of these is worth the hassle of keeping two languages in your head, but I do like the idea that people are writing new languages and syntaxes trying to figure out how to make our lives easier... *(this also seems true to a lesser extent with Swift and Objective-C, but I think that has more to do with Cocoa and the library interface than the underlying runtime/debugging issues)