I started learning Elixir a few months ago, and the few times I've had to dive into reading some Erlang source code to figure out an issue with a library I was

I started learning Elixir a few months ago, and the few times I've had to dive into reading some Erlang source code to figure out an issue with a library I was using I've been surprised at how easy I find it to read. Even though the syntax is quite foreign, having learned the general ideas of pattern matching, etc. in Elixir makes it a lot easier to read Erlang code. I don't think I'd ever set out to write a new project in Erlang: for me Elixir has all the advantages and none of the drawbacks. There's nothing you can do in Erlang that you can't do in Elixir, and you get the benefit of a much more expressive syntax and powerful metaprogramming. But there are a lot of quite mature Erlang libraries out there, and I don't see the point of replicating them all in Elixir, so I can see myself contributing patches to Erlang projects. Have a play with both, stick with whichever one feels better to you. Since you're just learning, you want whichever one will make you more excited about learning, and make it quicker to pick up the concepts. Once you've got a solid grasp of it, you can familiarize yourself with the few syntactic differences and make a more informed decision about which one you want to keep working with.