Elixir fixed all the things that didn't matter, and made all the things that matter harder and more expensive. Raw Erlang is better for anyone used to more than three languages.
As a guy who's been doing Ruby for 10 years, syntax matters very much to me.
> and made all the things that matter harder and more expensive
... Explain?
> Raw Erlang is better for anyone used to more than three languages.
While I can read and write "raw Erlang", I prefer Elixir, for whatever reason. The macro facility alone is far more powerful than anything Erlang can provide, I enjoy things like pipe |> which was taken from... crap, forgot which language... http://danthorpe.me/posts/pipe.html, protocols are a useful addition, and strings are natively-supported UTF-8 binaries and not arrays (well, you have both actually, depending on whether you single-quote or double-quote the string). And while both seem to be roughly as terse, I just find Elixir to be far more readable and more-organized-looking, compare Shannon entropy algorithms here for example http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Entropy#Elixir
Anyway, a lot of it is opinion, but I think it's good from anyone's perspective that Elixir is ultimately bringing more clever people onto the BEAM VM.
