"elixir is like fast/better ruby" is simplistic but it's also not entirely untrue. When I first started playing with Phoenix I found it palpably similar to Rail

"elixir is like fast/better ruby" is simplistic but it's also not entirely untrue. When I first started playing with Phoenix I found it palpably similar to Rails, but also faster and better in a lot of ways, especially the WebSockets story. When I started writing Elixir I didn't know how great it was nor did I understand how different it was from Ruby. The BEAM is a challenging thing to grok. As I used it more and more, I did learn and appreciate those things. But at no point, did I feel deceived about how similar Elixir and Ruby were supposed to have been. I was surprised and relieved by how many of the things I had to worry about in Ruby, I didn't have to worry about in Elixir. At the end of the day, Elixir's similarity to Ruby is part of what gets a lot of people like me in the door. It's a hook and I think it's a good one. I mean, sure, we're going to have to explain to people why they don't need something like Sidekiq, and we're going to do it many, many times. But that's what we do as a welcoming community. I guess it's a balance. If we have a lot of people trying out Elixir and leaving because they feel they were misinformed, that's definitely relevant. But I don't hear much of that. On the other hand, if we can use this similarity to get OO people to try out this crazy, awesome FP language that uses the actor model, that could really help grow the language. You're on point that Elixir really is a completely different paradigm, but I don't know if I agree that it really matters from a marketing perspective, particularly when marketing to Rubyists.