Comment by asa400

It's nonsense. The people who made Elixir understand Erlang and the BEAM as well as anyone on earth. Elixir and Erlang have different syntax but aren't even that semantically different. Contrast this with say, Java and Clojure. Clojure is significantly different than Java both in terms of what idiomatic code is, as well as how the average developer understands and uses their tools day-to-day. (Obviously they both run on the same VM, the JVM, which is why this comparison works.)

Elixir has some semantic "userspace"-level differences from Erlang (Elixir has protocols, macros, defaults to strings as binaries rather than strings as charlists, among other things) but they are much more similar than they are different. Both are on BEAM, both expression-based languages, both use processes for concurrency, have immutable data, use pattern matching for control flow, rely heavily on OTP, deploy with releases, share (or build on) the same datastructures, have the same performance characteristics, etc. If you know Elixir you pretty much already know Erlang modulo the time it takes to learn Erlang's syntax.