The stdlib is also a strong selling point of Elixir. Agent and Task modules are a nice addition. AFAIK they have no equivalent in Erlang stdlib. It's trivial to

The stdlib is also a strong selling point of Elixir. Agent and Task modules are a nice addition. AFAIK they have no equivalent in Erlang stdlib. It's trivial to implement them on top of gen_server, but that's it - you need to reimplement them every time, while in Elixir you have them available by default. DynamicSupervisor is similarly a nice(r) interface to simple_one_for_one supervisors. In terms of language features, Elixir gives you (almost first-class) modules, protocols, and macros. They are all implementable in Erlang, for example qlc is a DSL implemented with parse transforms (which are macros), but Elixir gives them to you nicely packaged and ready to use. It can also become a problem. I love Lisps, and love proper macros, but every other macro I see written by Elixir guys makes me cringe. Macros are a powerful tool and it takes time and effort to learn not to abuse them. In Lisps, even the younger ones, like Clojure, people only write macros if there's really no other way to do something. In Elixir, people write them for everything, they break hygiene habitually, and the language encourages that (the `use` and `__using__` are the biggest offenders here, IMHO). It's a trade-off between easy-to-write (in Elixir) and easy-to-read-and-debug (in Erlang). Both approaches are valid, but for different use-cases.