Ah, I've finally found someone in the wild who thinks Erlang's syntax is less weird than Elixir's! ;)

> 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.

Erlang: https://gist.github.com/mattsta/b6749e566f5cfd75762a

List comprehensions make no sense to anybody at first. But after you work with and struggle against them for a few days/weeks, everything will click. You'll be a better developer for understand them more intuitively.