elixir takes the operational characteristics of the beam, which are by historical serendipity very desirable for implementing http servers, sands the rough edge

elixir takes the operational characteristics of the beam, which are by historical serendipity very desirable for implementing http servers, sands the rough edges off erlang's tooling, and gives the language a syntactic facelift that is very comfortable and non-threatening for ruby-on-rails-generation webdevs in a similar spirit, phoenix takes cowboy, an http server written in erlang that very competently exploits the above-mentioned operational characteristics, and slots it into a relatively well-thought-out, ergonomic elixir web framework in summary, it appeals to “wow cool shiny clean low boilerplate” etc., but at the same time is built atop solid tech, & so doesn't shit the bed when you scale. similar vibe to why people fall in love clojure (or so i am told on that count)