I'd say Elixir is the sharper tool. It cuts better - and I don't mean the syntax, but the macros - which can be a bad thing if you slice yourself by mistake. E

I'd say Elixir is the sharper tool. It cuts better - and I don't mean the syntax, but the macros - which can be a bad thing if you slice yourself by mistake. Erlang, with its small and hard to extend syntax, its libraries, frameworks, and conventions, is geared towards stability. Erlang is meant for creating reliable systems, which will be maintained for decades. Erlang is the most conservative (in the sense Steve Yegge's post) of dynamic languages out there: it's verbose, predictable, boring, consistent, reliable and focused solely on fault-tolerance (ie. long term stability). Elixir tries to be a less conservative Erlang, but also good enough scripting and general purpose programming language. It's not a drastic change in capabilities, but rather re-focusing the language a bit to be more friendly to abstraction and extension. Elixir delivers on its promises magnificently: for my latest project, where I need the most expressive language I can get, I considered Elixir among such languages as Smalltalk, Io, Common Lisp, and Lua. So it's more than just syntactic preferences, but the two languages remain very closely related. Elixir functions are Erlang functions, you can use Elixir modules from Erlang just fine and so on. Erlang is a simpler language, so my advice is to start learning Elixir and you'll learn Erlang when reading articles about its libraries that you want to use.