As much as I love Elixir, it's really not just "basically Ruby with some slight modifications". The syntax is similar at a glance, but there are some major design differences (e.g. immutability); solving the same problem in Elixir and Ruby can require a completely different structure to your code.

I wrote this blog post about what I think are the three most important differences between Elixir and Ruby: https://phoenixonrails.com/blog/elixir-for-ruby-developers-t... . There's definitely a learning curve, although it's not insurmountable.

No monads though. No pure functions, no Option types, pretty much no recursion in practice. Really it’s got none of the stuff that makes some FP languages hard to learn. (Except maybe “no for loops”).

That's true - Elixir is simpler to learn than, say, Haskell. All I'm saying is that it's not a trivial jump from Elixir to Ruby, despite the superficially similar syntax.

I don’t think eg ruby->go is a bigger jump. Learn defer, structural typing, interfaces vs learn to replace all loops with map/filter/etc + pattern matching. Feels similar, no?

> it's basically Ruby with some slight modifications.

It /looks/ like Ruby in a lot of ways, but treating it like Ruby w/ modifications is a mistake that I've seen lead to a lot of really bad usage that (at best) fails to take advantage of the underlying Beam VM, and at worst [and more commonly] actively works against it.