Elixir is great. Simple and powerful. I just wish the size of the Erlang distribution was small so that I could use Elixir for desktop apps as well, as currently it would require a 100 mb VM for people to run even a 10 line script.

I have not used Elixir for anything big. I would really love to try elixir someday for bigger apps. Is there a Elixir-to-JS compiler somewhere? Nodejs is much smaller in size than BEAM. So distributing Elixir apps would be easier.

I agree. I'm learning Elixir right now, and I think it'll inject a lot more enthusiasm back into the Erlang stack.

Phoenix also feels like the extension to Rails.

Just looked at elixer and it seems really cool, but I'd like it better, i think, if it had typing like golang interfaces.

(I'm assuming the comparisons to ruby mean that it is very loosely typed, but I could be wrong). I wouldn't want to build a highly distributed app without a bunch of compiler help.

Elixir has _something_ similar: Behaviors - http://elixir-lang.org/getting-started/typespecs-and-behavio...

While this isn't exactly what you like, I thought I'd throw it out there because I find it a fair substitute, especially when paired with Dialyzer - a static code analysis tool: http://erlang.org/doc/man/dialyzer.html

Plus one for Elixir, it's what my smart friends who would learn Scala 5 years ago are doing now.

It sounds quite petty but the string support in Elixir looks great after reading over some Erlang material not too long ago.

I'm reading a lot about Elixir on HN, what are good resources to start learning it?

I recommend the books Programming Elixir and Elixir in Action. The latter is a little more advanced in terms of expecting some prior knowledge in functional programming but is a fantastic book nonetheless as well as a great resource for a basic understanding of OTP. The Elixir-lang website also is very good for understanding some of the basics related to the language. The language itself has great documentation.